23 accepted papers
Robotic-assisted procedures offer enhanced precision, but while fully autonomous systems are limited in task knowledge, difficulties in modeling unstructured environments, and generalization abilities, fully manual teleoperated systems also face challenges such as delay, stability, and reduced senso
Robotic-assisted procedures offer enhanced precision, but while fully autonomous systems are limited in task knowledge, difficulties in modeling unstructured environments, and generalisation abilities, fully manual teleoperated systems also face challenges such as delay, stability, and reduced senso…
Tactile exploration enables robots to acquire rich mechanical information about objects through physical interaction and enhances their perception and manipulation in unstructured environments. However, existing tactile object recognition methods are limited by closed-set assumptions, recognizing on
Perceiving the physical properties of different surfaces/textures via tactile sensing has been a long-standing problem in robotics. Most prior work has been limited to discriminative models that classify textures into a fixed set of categories. However, to enable seamless autonomous manipulation, ro…
Through the use of robotic supernumerary limbs, it has been proposed that a single user could perform tasks like surgery or industrial assembly that currently require a team. Although validation studies, often conducted in virtual reality, have demonstrated that individuals can learn to command supe
This study investigates the role of haptic feedback in a two-vehicle following scenario, where information about the motion of the front vehicle is provided through a virtual elastic connection with it. Using a robotic interface in a simulated driving environment, we examined the impact of varying l
Perceiving the physical properties of different surfaces/textures via tactile sensing has been a long-standing problem in robotics. Most prior work has been limited to discriminative models that classify textures into a fixed set of categories. However, to enable seamless and efficient autonomous ma
The utilization of shared control in the realm of surgical robotics augments precision and safety by amalgamating human expertise with autonomous assistance. This paper proposes a user-centered shared control framework enabling a robot to learn from expert demonstration, predict operators’ intent an…
The manipulation of instruments under a microscope suffers from physiological tremor and human errors, which are inevitable in long microsurgery interventions. Robotic systems developed in recent years for microsurgery are expensive and not flexible, as they cannot use standard instruments, and need…
While surgical robots, such as the da Vinci Surgical System, have become prevalent in minimally invasive surgery, they are predominantly used by the human operator to directly teleoperate the tools. This paper aims to analyse the different methods of human robot shared control in the surgical domain…
An essential problem in robotic systems that are to be deployed in unstructured environments is the accurate and autonomous perception of the shapes of previously unseen objects. Existing methods for shape estimation or reconstruction have leveraged either visual or tactile interactive exploration t
Many surgical tasks require three or more tools working together, where a hands-free interface could extend a surgeon's actions to control a third surgical tool. However, most current interfaces do not allow skilled control of grasping critical to robotic manipulation. Here we first present a system…
For robotic systems to interact with objects in dynamic environments, it is essential to perceive the physical properties of the objects such as shape, friction coefficient, mass, center of mass, and inertia. This not only eases selecting manipulation action but also ensures the task is performed as…
While the traditional control of surgical robots relies on fully manual teleoperations, human-robot collaborative systems promise to address issues such as workspace constrains and laborious tasks. In particular, shared control can reduce the surgeon's workload and improve the overall surgical perfo
This paper presents a wearable device for finger assessment that can identify finger joint impedance parameters through harmonic oscillation perturbations. This device is designed to help assess motor impairments related to hypertonic soft-tissue changes, that can arise from a number of conditions s…
This work presents a novel active visuo-tactile based framework for robotic systems to accurately estimate pose of objects in dense cluttered environments. The scene representation is derived using a novel declutter graph (DG) which describes the relationship among objects in the scene for declutter
Robotic bimanual training can benefit from understanding how to modify human motor effort in bimanual tasks. We addressed this issue by carrying out a study to investigate whether and how penalizing the use of one hand could alter the hands’ effort distribution. Actuated haptic perturbations and alt
In traditional endoscopic surgery, the surgeon manipulating the endoscopic instruments is supported by an assistant controlling the endoscope, where their coordination may be affected by communication errors. To address this issue, we introduce a foot interface controlled robotic endoscopic system,
The capacity of the biomechanics of human limbs to absorb energy during physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) can play an imperative role in controlling the performance of human-centered robotics systems. Using the concept of “excess of passivity,” we have recently designed passivity signature map
This letter introduces a sensory augmentation technique enabling a contact robot to understand its human user's control in real-time and integrate their reference trajectory information into its own sensory feedback to improve the tracking performance. The human's control is formulated as a feedback
This letter presents an experimental study on balance recovery control with a lower limb exoskeleton robot. Four participants were subjected to a perturbation during standing, a forward force impulse applied to their pelvis that forced them to step forward with the right leg for balance recovery. Tr
We developed a foot interface enabling an operator to control a robotic arm with four degrees of freedom in continuous direction and speed, for operating one of the multiple tools required during robot-aided surgery. In this letter, we first test whether this pedal interface can be used to carry out
Current robotic rehabilitation devices have a high cost-to-benefit ratio, which prevents their large scale adoption by the clinical rehabilitation community. This paper first presents H-Man, a low cost planar robot, as a quantitative assessment and training tool. This is followed by a preliminary st…