14 accepted papers
In situ tissue biopsy with an endoluminal catheter is an efficient approach for disease diagnosis, featuring low invasiveness and few complications. However, the endoluminal catheter struggles to adjust the biopsy direction by distal endoscope bending or proximal twisting for tissue sampling within
Autonomous driving holds promise for increased safety, optimized traffic management, and a new level of convenience in transportation. While model-based reinforcement learning approaches such as MuZero enables long-term planning, the exponentially increase of the number of search nodes as the tree g
Surgical robots with variable stiffness can provide more stable configurations during minimally-invasive surgery.This letter presents a new design of modular lockable mechanism which can be used to change the stiffness of tendon-driven surgical robots. Locking and unlocking are simply actuated by pu
Flexible robots have been widely used in minimally-invasive surgery because of their dexterity and accuracy. However, the torsion of end-effector under bending state usually produces unnecessary concomitant motion of the robot arm. This letter proposes a novel design of <i>in-situ</i> torsionally-st
Flexible robots with <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in-situ</i> torsion can be used in laryngeal endoscopic surgery which can maintain the position and approach vector of the end-effector during the operation. However, the inherent e
This paper proposes a new network for reconstructing multi-object point cloud. Different from previous networks which reconstruct multi-object point cloud as a whole, our network iteratively reconstructs each individual object point cloud from a frame of multi-object point cloud. To achieve this goa…
Magnetically-actuated flexible endoscopes (MAFE) have been well used in minimally-invasive surgery because they can be steered by a magnetic field thus more flexible than traditional endoscopes. Model-free and uncalibrated visual-feedback control makes it possible to manipulate MAFE with a magnetic…
Most existing bipedal robots can only move with either their wheels or feet. Even if some of them are capable of transforming between these two motions, they need to change their configuration dramatically. In order to truly combine the advantages of wheeled and footed robots, in this letter, an <it
Magnetic soft robots have attracted widespread attention for their untethered, remotely operated, and compliant deformation characteristics. Earlier work has demonstrated magnetic origami robots' diverse locomotion capabilities. This letter will focus on the motion generation and open-loop control o
Magnetically-actuated robotic catheter (MARC) has shown great potential in minimally-invasive surgery because they can be steered remotely and wirelessly. However, when driven by external permanent magnets (EPM), the MARC is subject to nonlinearly-coupled gravitational, magnetic, and elastic forces,
Small-scale robots have great potential in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). In this paper, we propose an untethered magnetic gripper with small scale and build a double-magnet model for it. The gripper is 4.3mm long and its maximum width is 4mm. It contains a spindle and two magnets, which can achi…
This paper presents a novel continuum robot sheath for use in single-port minimally invasive procedures such as neuroendoscopy in which the sheath is designed to deliver multiple robotic arms. Articulation of the sheath is achieved by using precurved superelastic tubes lining the working channels us…
This paper introduces a robust point cloud registration method which utilizes not only positional but also the orientation information at each point. The proposed method takes a probabilistic approach which forms the problem as a hybrid mixture model, in which a Von-Mises-Fisher mixture model (FMM)…
Alignment of two point clouds is an essential problem in medical robotics and computer-assisted surgery. In this paper, we first formally formulate the generalized point cloud registration problem in a probabilistic manner. Specifically, not only positional but also the orientational information are…