14 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…
Tendon-sheath mechanisms (TSMs) are widely used in minimally invasive surgical (MIS) applications, but their inherent hysteresis—caused by friction, backlash, and tendon elongation—leads to significant tracking errors. Conventional modeling and compensation methods struggle with these non-linearitie
Flexible continuum manipulators are valued for minimally invasive surgery, offering access to confined spaces through nonlinear paths. However, cable-driven manipulators face control difficulties due to hysteresis from cabling effects such as friction, elongation, and coupling. These effects are dif
In robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS), optimal placement of the surgical robot base is crucial for successful surgery. Improper placement can hinder performance because of manipulator limitations and inaccessible workspaces. Conventional base placement relies on the experience of trai…
Robotic Surgical Assistants (RSAs) are commonly used to perform minimally invasive surgeries by expert surgeons. However, long procedures filled with tedious and repetitive tasks such as suturing can lead to surgeon fatigue, motivating the automation of suturing. As visual tracking of a thin reflect…
Assisting surgeons with automation of surgical subtasks is challenging due to backlash, hysteresis, and variable tensioning in cable-driven robots. These issues are exacerbated as surgical instruments are changed during an operation. In this work, we propose a framework for automation of high- preci…
Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific fabric manipulation tasks, but comparatively less focus on algorithms which can per…
Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm which navigates this tradeoff by (1) leveraging offline dat
Sequential pulling policies to flatten and smooth fabrics have applications from surgery to manufacturing to home tasks such as bed making and folding clothes. Due to the complexity of fabric states and dynamics, we apply deep imitation learning to learn policies that, given color (RGB), depth (D),…
Automation of surgical subtasks using cable-driven robotic surgical assistants (RSAs) such as Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) is challenging due to imprecision in control from cable-related effects such as cable stretching and hysteresis. We propose a novel approach to efficiently
Many surgical robots with steerable surgical instruments have been proposed for endoscopic surgery. Surgical instruments should be small in size for insertion into the body and be able to handle large payloads such as tissue. Because the overall diameter and payload parameters are a trade-off, it is…
The use of flexible endoscope has been rising inconveniences. Steering of the distal section is not intuitive and the weight of the endoscope burdens a physical pressure on physicians who use it continuously for a long time. Also, the limited dexterity of an instrument makes therapeutic procedures m…
For safety enhancement reasons, passive gravity compensation is widely applied in robotic systems used in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). MIS robotic systems have a remote center of motion (RCM) in which a surgical instrument conducts a fulcrum motion around a point of invasion. RCM mechanisms inc
In robotics, robotic arms should be smaller, less expensive, and able to demonstrate a better performance, in order to be utilized in various fields. However, expensive actuators and speed reducers are required to generate sufficient force at the end effector after overcoming the gravitational torqu…