9 accepted papers
Automation of suturing subtasks, such as needle handover, has the potential to reduce surgeons' fatigue and improve surgical efficiency. Needle handover is particularly challenging due to the combinatorial nature of grasping and handover strategies, uncertainties in needle pose estimation, and inacc…
Cloth manipulation is a category of deformable object manipulation of great interest to the robotics community, from applications of automated laundry-folding and home organizing to textiles and flexible manufacturing. Despite the desire for automated cloth manipulation, the thin-shell dynamics and…
Accurate deformable object manipulation (DOM) is essential for achieving autonomy in robotic surgery, where soft tissues are being displaced, stretched, and dissected. Many DOM methods can be powered by simulation, which ensures realistic deformation by adhering to the governing physical constraints…
Deploying humans in a high-risk environment to extract casualties in order to provide medical attention is an inherently dangerous endeavor. To minimize this risk, Robotics and Autonomous Systems can be deployed in hazardous areas in place of human personnel to limit the exposure of first responders…
Automating the process of manipulating and delivering sutures during robotic surgery is a prominent problem at the frontier of surgical robotics, as automating this task can significantly reduce surgeons' fatigue during tele-operated surgery and allow them to spend more time addressing higher-level…
Robots will be expected to manipulate a wide variety of objects in complex and arbitrary ways as they become more widely used in human environments. As such; the rearrangement of objects has been noted to be an important benchmark for AI capabilities in recent years. We propose NeRP (Neural Rearrang…
This paper focuses on real-time occupancy mapping and collision checking onboard an autonomous robot navigating in an unknown environment. We propose a new map representation, in which occupied and free space are separated by the decision boundary of a kernel perceptron classifier. We develop an onl…
We introduce the Fastron, a configuration space (C-space) model to be used as a proxy to kinematic-based collision detection. The Fastron allows iterative updates to account for a changing environment through a combination of a novel formulation of the kernel perceptron learning algorithm and an act
Being inherently compliant, the robotic artificial muscles are increasingly popular in applications such as safe human-robot interaction, legged robotics, prostheses and orthoses, and soft robotics. Their full utilization is often challenged by the coupled hysteresis among input, strain, and tension…