22 accepted papers
In this letter, we present a visual control framework for accurately positioning feature points belonging to the surface of a 3D deformable object to desired 3D positions, by acting on a set of manipulated points using a robotic manipulator. Notably, our framework considers the dynamic behavior of t
In this letter, we propose a shape visual servoing approach for manipulating a suspended cable attached between two quadrotor drones. A leader-follower control strategy is presented, where a human operator controls the rigid motion of the cable by teleoperating one drone (the leader), while the seco
In this paper, we propose a physics-based robot controller to deform a soft object toward a desired 3D shape using a limited number of handling points. For this purpose, the shape of the deformable object is represented using Fourier descriptors. We derive the analytical relation that provides the v…
In this paper we propose a visual servoing approach that controls the deformation of a suspended tether cable subject to gravity from visual data provided by a RGB-D camera. The cable shape is modelled with a parabolic curve together with the orientation of the plane containing the tether. The visua…
We present a haptic teleoperation system capable of steering flexible needles under ultrasound imaging toward a target. With respect to similar works, this approach enables intuitive control of the needle motion while providing the user with 3D navigation and needle tip cutting force using a combina
In this paper, we propose a framework for tracking the deformation of soft objects using a RGB-D camera by utilizing the physically-based model of the considered object. A coarse, 3D template of the object being tracked is the only prior information required by the proposed method. The proposed appr…
In this paper, we propose the ADVISEd (Active Deformation through VIsual SErvoing) method, a novel model-free deformation servoing method able to deform a soft object towards a desired shape. ADVISEd relies on an online estimation of the deformation Jacobian that relates the motion of the robot end-…
In this letter, we propose a novel approach to automatically control the 3D shape of deformable wires using robots. Our approach proposes a novel visual feature along with a novel shape servoing method to enable dual arm manipulation of deformable wires. The visual feature relies on a geometric B-sp
In this paper, we propose a novel method to simultaneously track the deformation of soft objects and estimate their elasticity parameters. The tracking of the deformable object is performed by combining the visual information captured by a RGB-D sensor with interactive Finite Element Method simulati…
Needle insertion procedures can greatly benefit from robotic systems to improve their accuracy and success rate. However, a fully automated system is usually not desirable and the clinicians need to be included in the control loop. In this paper we present a teleoperation framework for beveledtip fl…
Needle insertion procedures under ultrasound guidance are commonly used for diagnosis and therapy. It is often critical to accurately reach a targeted region, and this can be difficult to achieve due to intraoperative tissue motion. In this letter, we present a method to steer a beveled-tip flexible
In this paper we present a novel approach to track and explore stiff tissues within 3-D ultrasound volumes acquired by a medical 3-D ultrasound probe mounted on a six degrees of freedom robotic arm. Autonomous palpation and on-line elastography process are implemented to estimate the elastic propert…
This paper presents a robot-assisted system to obtain elastic information of a moving tissue using a 2-D ultrasound probe actuated by a 6 degrees of freedom robotic arm. The proposed method combines ultrasound image-based visual servoing, force control and non-rigid motion estimation. We present how…
The precise location of tumors is an important step in surgical planning that can be obtained from mechanical properties of soft tissues. In this paper we propose a robotic-assisted palpation system that automatically moves an ultrasound probe to optimize the elastography process and improve the res…
We propose a control framework to optimize the quality of robotic ultrasound imaging while tracking an anatomical target. We use a multitask approach to control the in-plane motion of a convex probe mounted on the end-effector of a robotic arm, based not only on the position of the target in the ima
Works on robotic needle steering often consider either tip-based control of flexible beveled tip needles or control of the bending of symmetric tip needles. In this paper a control law for needle steering which uses both direct manipulation of the needle base and the control of the tip deflection, i
With the increasing number of clinical interventions using needle shaped tools, robotic control of needle insertion procedures has been an active research field for many years. In this work we propose a 3D model of a flexible needle that takes into account tissue deformations in order to predict the…
This paper deals with the development of a vision-based controller for robot-assisted medical applications. It concerns the use of shearlet coefficients in case of ultrasounds (US) images as visual signal inputs and the design of the associated interaction matrix. The proposed controller was validat…
This paper deals with the development of a new 6 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) vision-based controller for robot-assisted medical applications. The main objective is to use visual information extracted from Ultrasounds (US) images to control an US probe held by a robot. Instead of the conventional use of
We present a method for the three-dimensional (3D) steering of a flexible needle under 3D ultrasound guidance. The proposed solution is based on a duty-cycling visual servoing strategy we designed in a previous work, and on a new needle tracking algorithm for 3D ultrasound. The flexible needle model…
In this paper we propose a new ultrasound-based visual servoing framework, for the optimization of the positioning of an ultrasound probe manipulated by a robotic arm, in order to improve the quality of the acquired ultrasound images. To this end, we use the recent framework of ultrasound confidence…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for tracking a deformable anatomical target within 3D ultrasound volumes. Our method is able to estimate deformations caused by the physiological motions of the patient. The displacements of moving structures are estimated from an intensity-based approach c…