18 accepted papers
Open Spina Bifida (OSB) is a congenital neural tube defect that affects approximately 1 in 1000 births worldwide. Robotic in-utero OSB repair provides a minimally invasive alternative to open-surgery, which places significant strain on both baby and mother. Recent advancements in da Vinci miniature
The Galen Surgical Robot is an admittance controlled collaborative robot that can enhance the performance of surgeons in microsurgery by sharing the load of instruments, preventing hand tremor and improving precision. In mastoidectomy, contacting the temporal bone of the skull and drilling with the
Skull base surgery is a demanding field in which surgeons operate in and around the skull while avoiding critical anatomical structures including nerves and vasculature. While image-guided surgical navigation is the prevailing standard, limitation still exists requiring personalized planning and rec…
Automation in surgical robotics has the potential to improve patient safety and surgical efficiency, but it is difficult to achieve due to the need for robust perception algorithms. In particular, 6D pose estimation of surgical instruments is critical to enable the automatic execution of surgical ma…
Despite advancements in robotic-assisted surgery, automating complex tasks like suturing remains challenging due to the need for adaptability and precision. Learning-based approaches, particularly reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL), require realistic simulation environments for…
The introduction of image-guided surgical navigation (IGSN) has greatly benefited technically demanding surgical procedures by providing real-time support and guidance to the surgeon during surgery. To develop effective IGSN, a careful selection of the surgical information and the medium to present…
Telesurgery has a clear potential for providing high-quality surgery to medically underserved areas like rural areas, battlefields, and spacecraft; nevertheless, effective methods to overcome unreliable communication systems are still lacking. Furthermore, it is not well understood how users react a…
Human-robot shared control, which integrates the advantages of both humans and robots, is an effective approach to facilitate efficient surgical operation. Learning from demonstration (LfD) techniques can be used to automate some of the surgical sub tasks for the construction of the shared control m…
Automation has the potential to improve the standard of care but is difficult to realize due to perceptual challenges, especially in soft-tissue surgery. Machine learning can provide solutions, but typically requires large amounts of training data, which is time-consuming to collect. Even with share
Traditional teleoperation (leader/follower) systems primarily focus on one operator controlling one remote robot, but as robots become ubiquitous, there is an increasing need for multiple operators, including autonomous agents, to collaboratively control multiple robots. However, existing teleoperat
Interactive simulators are used in several important applications which include the training simulators for teleoperated robotic laparoscopic surgery. While stateof-art simulators are capable of rendering realistic visuals and accurate dynamics, grasping is often implemented using kinematic simplifi…
We present an open-source framework that provides a low barrier to entry for real-time simulation, visualization, and interactive manipulation of user-specifiable soft-bodies, environments, and robots (using a human-readable front-end interface). The simulated soft-bodies can be interacted by a vari…
The recent development of Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RAMIS) has brought much benefit to ease the performance of complex Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) tasks and lead to more clinical outcomes. Compared to direct master-slave manipulation, semi-autonomous control for the surgical ro…
The da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) is a teleoperated surgical robotic system. For dynamic simulations and model-based control, the dynamic model of the dVRK is required. We present an open-source dynamic model identification package for the dVRK, capable of modeling the parallelograms, springs, counte
Robot Dynamic Simulators offer convenient implementation and testing of physical robots, thus accelerating research and development. While existing simulators support most real-world robots with serially linked kinematic and dynamic chains, they offer limited or conditional support for complex close…
Surgical robots for laparoscopy consist of several patient side slave manipulators that are controlled via surgeon operated master telemanipulators. Commercial surgical robots do not perform any sub-tasks - even of repetitive or noninvasive nature - autonomously or provide intelligent assistance. Wh…
The use of robotics for laparoscopic surgery has been an established field for over a decade. However, with the influx of advanced tools and algorithms for general purpose robotics, there is a need to incorporate these advancements into medical robotics technology. The daVinci Research Kit and its s…