12 accepted papers
Surgical automation holds immense potential to improve the outcome and accessibility of surgery. Recent studies use reinforcement learning to automate various surgical tasks. However, these policies are developed independently, and their reusability is limited when applied to other scenarios, making…
Robot pose estimation is a challenging and crucial task for vision-based surgical robotic automation. Typical robotic calibration approaches, however, are not applicable to surgical robots, such as the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) [1], due to joint angle measurement errors from cable-drives and the
Robotic teleoperation over long communication distances poses challenges due to delays in commands and feedback from network latency. One simple yet effective strategy to reduce errors and increase performance under delay is to downscale the relative motion between the operating surgeon and the robo
Surgical automation holds immense potential to improve the outcome and accessibility of surgery. Recent studies use reinforcement learning to automate various surgical tasks. However, these policies are developed independently, and their reusability is limited when applied to other scenarios, making
Controlling robotic manipulators via visual feedback requires a known coordinate frame transformation between the robot and the camera. Uncertainties in mechanical systems as well as camera calibration create errors in this coordinate frame transformation. These errors result in poor localization of…
Inaccurate tool localization is one of the main reasons for failures in automating surgical tasks. Imprecise robot kinematics and noisy observations caused by the poor visual acuity of an endoscopic camera make tool tracking challenging. Previous works in surgical automation adopt environment-specif…
There has been increasing awareness of the difficulties in reaching and extracting people from mass casualty scenarios, such as those arising from natural disasters. While platforms have been designed to consider reaching casualties and even carrying them out of harm's way, the challenge of repositi…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have long sought to approach the efficiency of human learning. Humans are great observers who can learn by aggregating external knowledge from various sources, including observations from others' policies of attempting a task. Prior studies in RL have incorporated…
Autonomous suturing has been a long-sought-after goal for surgical robotics. Outside of staged environments, accurate localization of suture needles is a critical foundation for automating various suture needle manipulation tasks in the real world. When localizing a needle held by a gripper, previou…
Accurate and robust tracking and reconstruction of the surgical scene is a critical enabling technology toward autonomous robotic surgery. Existing algorithms for 3D perception in surgery mainly rely on geometric information, while we propose to also leverage semantic information inferred from the e…
Suture needle localization is necessary for autonomous suturing. Previous approaches in autonomous suturing often relied on fiducial markers rather than markerless detection schemes for localizing a suture needle due to the in-consistency of markerless detections. However, fiducial markers are not p…
Regrasping a suture needle is an important yet time-consuming process in suturing. To bring efficiency into regrasping, prior work either designs a task-specific mechanism or guides the gripper toward some specific pick-up point for proper grasping of a needle. Yet, these methods are usually not dep…