22 accepted papers
Deformable object manipulation is pivotal to numerous real-world robotic applications. A promising paradigm in this field is the shape servoing task, focusing on controlling deformable objects into desired goal shapes. However, prior works typically rely on impractical goal shape acquisition methods…
Continuum robots enable dexterous manipulation in constrained environments, but require accurate and efficient models for real-time manipulation and control. Traditional physics-based models can be computationally expensive and may suffer from inaccuracies due to unmodeled effects, while current lea…
Monocular depth estimation (MDE) provides a useful tool for robotic perception, but its predictions are often uncertain and inaccurate in challenging environments such as surgical scenes where textureless surfaces, specular reflections, and occlusions are common. To address this, we propose ProbeMDE…
Autonomous surgical robots are a promising solution to the increasing demand for surgery amid a shortage of surgeons. Recent work has proposed learning-based approaches for the autonomous manipulation of soft tissue. However, due to variability in aspects such as tissue geometries and stiffnesses, t…
Surgical automation requires precise guidance and understanding of the scene. Current methods in the literature rely on bulky depth cameras to create maps of the anatomy; however, this does not translate well to space-limited clinical applications. Monocular cameras are small and allow minimally inv
Tendon-driven continuum robots have been gaining popularity in medical applications due to their ability to curve around complex anatomical structures, potentially reducing the invasiveness of surgery. However, accurate modeling is required to plan and control the movements of these flexible robots.
Shape servoing, a robotic task dedicated to controlling objects to desired goal shapes, is a promising approach to deformable object manipulation. An issue arises, however, with the reliance on the specification of a goal shape. This goal has been obtained either by a laborious domain knowledge engi…
Robotic surgical subtask automation has the potential to reduce the per-patient workload of human surgeons. There are a variety of surgical subtasks that require geometric information of subsurface anatomy, such as the location of tumors, which necessitates accurate and efficient surgical sensing. I…
Mechanical metamaterials are microscale patterned structures that are designed to have specific mechanical properties at a macro-scale that are atypical of natural materials. Robotic manipulators composed of these materials can exhibit deformation and motion capabilities that can be customized and e…
Toward the future goal of creating a lung surgery system featuring multiple tentacle-like robots, we present a new folding concept for continuum robots that enables them to squeeze through openings smaller than the robot's nominal diameter (e.g., the narrow space between adjacent ribs). This is faci
If robots could reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects, they could find applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistance. Analytic models of elastic, 3D deformable objects require numerous parameters to describe the potentially infinite de…
Lung cancer is one of the deadliest types of cancer, and early diagnosis is crucial for successful treatment. Definitively diagnosing lung cancer typically requires biopsy, but current approaches either carry a high procedural risk for the patient or are incapable of reaching many sites of clinical
Steerable needles that are able to follow curvilinear trajectories and steer around anatomical obstacles are a promising solution for many interventional procedures. In the lung, these needles can be deployed from the tip of a conventional bronchoscope to reach lung lesions for diagnosis. The reach…
Enabling robots to understand instructions provided via spoken natural language would facilitate interaction between robots and people in a variety of settings in homes and workplaces. However, natural language instructions are often missing information that would be obvious to a human based on envi…
We present a method that plans motions for a concentric tube robot to automatically reach surgical targets inside the body while avoiding obstacles, where the patient's anatomy is represented by point clouds. Point clouds can be generated intra-operatively via endoscopic instruments, enabling the sy…
Inspection planning, the task of planning motions that allow a robot to inspect a set of points of interest, has applications in domains such as industrial, field, and medical robotics. Inspection planning can be computationally challenging, as the search space over motion plans that inspect the poi…
A motion-planning problem's setup can drastically affect the quality of solutions returned by the planner. In this work we consider optimizing these setups, with a focus on doing so in a computationally-efficient fashion. Our approach interleaves optimization with motion planning, which allows us to…
We introduce a method to optimize on a patient-specific basis the kinematic design of the Continuum Reconfigurable Incisionless Surgical Parallel (CRISP) robot, a needle-diameter medical robot based on a parallel structure that is capable of performing minimally invasive procedures. Our objective is…
Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer, and early diagnosis is critical to favorable survival rates. Definitive diagnosis of lung cancer typically requires needle biopsy. Common lung nodule biopsy approaches either carry significant risk or are incapable of accessing large regions of the lung,…
Continuum Reconfigurable Incisionless Surgical Parallel (CRISP) robots consist of multiple needle-diameter flexible instruments that are assembled into a parallel structure inside the human body. With a camera placed at the tip of one of the instruments, the CRISP robot can be used to inspect anatom…
Concentric tube robots are thin, tentacle-like devices that can move along curved paths and can potentially enable new, less invasive surgical procedures. Safe and effective operation of this type of robot requires that the robot's shaft avoid sensitive anatomical structures (e.g., critical vessels…
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death, and early-stage diagnosis is critical to survival. Biopsy is typically required for a definitive diagnosis, but current low-risk clinical options for lung biopsy cannot access all biopsy sites. We introduce a motion planner for a multilumen t…