28 accepted papers
Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is an effective minimally invasive approach to removing colon cancer, yet it is underutilized, since it is challenging to learn and perform. To promote the adoption of ESD by making it easier, we propose a system in which two small, flexible robotic manipulator
Robot autonomy is driving an ever-increasing demand for computational power, including on-board multi-core CPUs and accelerators such as GPUs, to enable fast perception, planning, control, and more. Careful scheduling of these computational tasks on the CPU cores and GPUs is important to prevent loc
Steerable needles are novel medical devices capa-ble of following curved paths through tissue, enabling them to avoid anatomical obstacles and steer to hard-to-reach sites in tissue, including targets in the lung for lung cancer diagnosis. Steerable needles are typically deployed into tissue from an
As scientific research in chemistry, materials science, and applied sciences becomes increasingly complex and data-driven, there is a growing need for efficient, scalable, and flexible automation to accelerate discoveries and reduce human burden and error in laboratories. We introduce the Experiment
Lab automation has the potential to accelerate scientific progress in the natural sciences, allowing tedious experiments that would require many hours of human time to be automated, enabling higher accuracy, efficiency, and repeatability. Mobile manipulation robots have the potential to work in chem…
Bronchoscopy is currently the least invasive method for definitively diagnosing lung cancer, which kills more people in the United States than any other form of cancer. Successfully diagnosing suspicious lung nodules requires accurate localization of the bronchoscope relative to a planned biopsy sit…
Steerable needles are medical devices with the ability to follow curvilinear paths to reach targets while circumventing obstacles. In the deployment process, a human operator typically places the steerable needle at its start position on a tissue surface and then hands off control to the automation…
Medical steerable needles can follow 3D curvilinear trajectories inside body tissue, enabling them to move around critical anatomical structures and precisely reach clinically significant targets in a minimally invasive way. Automating needle steering, with motion planning as a key component, has th…
Lung cancer is one of the deadliest types of cancer, and early diagnosis is crucial for successful treatment. Definitively diagnosing lung cancer typically requires biopsy, but current approaches either carry a high procedural risk for the patient or are incapable of reaching many sites of clinical
The inspection-planning problem calls for computing motions for a robot that allow it to inspect a set of points of interest (POIs) while considering plan quality (e.g., plan length). This problem has applications across many domains where robots can help with inspection, including infrastructure ma…
Steerable needles that are able to follow curvilinear trajectories and steer around anatomical obstacles are a promising solution for many interventional procedures. In the lung, these needles can be deployed from the tip of a conventional bronchoscope to reach lung lesions for diagnosis. The reach…
Medical steerable needles can move along 3D curvilinear trajectories to avoid anatomical obstacles and reach clinically significant targets inside the human body. Automating steerable needle procedures can enable physicians and patients to harness the full potential of steerable needles by maximally…
Enabling robots to understand instructions provided via spoken natural language would facilitate interaction between robots and people in a variety of settings in homes and workplaces. However, natural language instructions are often missing information that would be obvious to a human based on envi…
For robots using motion planning algorithms such as RRT and RRT*, the computational load can vary by orders of magnitude as the complexity of the local environment changes. To adaptively provide such computation, we propose Fog Robotics algorithms in which cloud-based serverless lambda computing pro…
Motion Planning Templates (MPT) is a C++ template-based library that uses compile-time polymorphism to generate robot-specific motion planning code and is geared towards eking out as much performance as possible when running on the low-power CPU of a battery-powered small robot. To use MPT, develope…
Generating robot motions from a precomputed graph has proven to be an effective approach to solving many motion planning problems. After their generation, roadmaps reduce complex motion planning problems to that of solving a graph-based shortest path. However, generating the graph can involve tradeo…
We present a method that plans motions for a concentric tube robot to automatically reach surgical targets inside the body while avoiding obstacles, where the patient's anatomy is represented by point clouds. Point clouds can be generated intra-operatively via endoscopic instruments, enabling the sy…
Inspection planning, the task of planning motions that allow a robot to inspect a set of points of interest, has applications in domains such as industrial, field, and medical robotics. Inspection planning can be computationally challenging, as the search space over motion plans that inspect the poi…
A motion-planning problem's setup can drastically affect the quality of solutions returned by the planner. In this work we consider optimizing these setups, with a focus on doing so in a computationally-efficient fashion. Our approach interleaves optimization with motion planning, which allows us to…
We introduce a method to optimize on a patient-specific basis the kinematic design of the Continuum Reconfigurable Incisionless Surgical Parallel (CRISP) robot, a needle-diameter medical robot based on a parallel structure that is capable of performing minimally invasive procedures. Our objective is…
Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer, and early diagnosis is critical to favorable survival rates. Definitive diagnosis of lung cancer typically requires needle biopsy. Common lung nodule biopsy approaches either carry significant risk or are incapable of accessing large regions of the lung,…
In highly constrained settings, e.g., a tentacle-like medical robot maneuvering through narrow cavities in the body for minimally invasive surgery, it may be difficult or impossible for a robot with a generic kinematic design to reach all desirable targets while avoiding obstacles. We introduce a de…
Continuum Reconfigurable Incisionless Surgical Parallel (CRISP) robots consist of multiple needle-diameter flexible instruments that are assembled into a parallel structure inside the human body. With a camera placed at the tip of one of the instruments, the CRISP robot can be used to inspect anatom…
Utilizing appropriate landmarks in the environment is often critical to planning a robot's motion for a given task. We propose a method to automatically learn task-relevant landmarks, and incorporate the method into an asymptotically optimal motion planner that is informed by a set of human-guided d
Concentric tube robots are thin, tentacle-like devices that can move along curved paths and can potentially enable new, less invasive surgical procedures. Safe and effective operation of this type of robot requires that the robot's shaft avoid sensitive anatomical structures (e.g., critical vessels…
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death, and early-stage diagnosis is critical to survival. Biopsy is typically required for a definitive diagnosis, but current low-risk clinical options for lung biopsy cannot access all biopsy sites. We introduce a motion planner for a multilumen t…
Concentric tube robots are tentacle-like medical robots that can bend around anatomical obstacles to access hard-to-reach clinical targets. The component tubes of these robots can be swapped prior to performing a task in order to customize the robot's behavior and reachable workspace. Optimizing a r…
Lung cancer is the most deadly form of cancer, and survival depends on early-stage diagnosis and treatment. Transoral access is preferable to traditional between-the-ribs needle insertion because it is less invasive and reduces risk of lung collapse. Yet many sites in the peripheral zones of the lun…