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Deep learning has the potential to have the impact on robot touch that it has had on robot vision. Optical tactile sensors act as a bridge between the subjects by allowing techniques from vision to be applied to touch. In this paper, we…

In this paper, we present a synergic learning algorithm to address the task of indirect manipulation of an unknown deformable tissue. Tissue manipulation is a common yet challenging task in various surgical interventions, which makes it a…

Autonomous fabric manipulation is a longstanding challenge in robotics, but evaluating progress is difficult due to the cost and diversity of robot hardware. Using Reach, a cloud robotics platform that enables low-latency remote execution…

For humans, the process of grasping an object relies heavily on rich tactile feedback. Most recent robotic grasping work, however, has been based only on visual input, and thus cannot easily benefit from feedback after initiating contact.…

Automatic surgical gesture recognition is a prerequisite of intra-operative computer assistance and objective surgical skill assessment. Prior works either require additional sensors to collect kinematics data or have limitations on…

Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people. The…

Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…

In recent decades, the tremendous benefits surgical robots have brought to surgeons and patients have been witnessed. With the dexterous operation and the great precision, surgical robots can offer patients less recovery time and less…

Ultrasound-guided percutaneous needle insertion is a standard procedure employed in both biopsy and ablation in clinical practices. However, due to the complex interaction between tissue and instrument, the needle may deviate from the…

The use of needles to access sites within organs is fundamental to many interventional medical procedures both for diagnosis and treatment. Safe and accurate navigation of a needle through living tissue to an intra-tissue target is…

Goal: A limitation in robotic surgery is the lack of force feedback, due to challenges in suitable sensing techniques. To enhance the perception of the surgeons and precise force rendering, estimation of these forces along with tissue…

Evaluating surgeon skill has predominantly been a subjective task. Development of objective methods for surgical skill assessment are of increased interest. Recently, with technological advances such as robotic-assisted minimally invasive…

Surgical training in medical school residency programs has followed the apprenticeship model. The learning and assessment process is inherently subjective and time-consuming. Thus, there is a need for objective methods to assess surgical…

Tactile sensing is a crucial perception mode for robots and human amputees in need of controlling a prosthetic device. Today robotic and prosthetic systems are still missing the important feature of accurate tactile sensing. This lack is…

The dominant paradigm for end-to-end robot learning focuses on optimizing task-specific objectives that solve a single robotic problem such as picking up an object or reaching a target position. However, recent work on high-capacity models…

Autonomous surgery has attracted increasing attention for revolutionizing robotic patient care, yet remains a distant and challenging goal. In this paper, we propose an image-based framework for high-precision autonomous suturing operation.…

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery is improving surgeon performance and patient outcomes. This innovation is also turning what has been a subjective practice into motion sequences that can be precisely measured. A growing number of…

Adverse surgical outcomes are costly to patients and hospitals. Approaches to benchmark surgical care are often limited to gross measures across the entire procedure despite the performance of particular tasks being largely responsible for…

Background Analyzing kinematic and video data can help identify potentially erroneous motions that lead to sub-optimal surgeon performance and safety-critical events in robot-assisted surgery. Methods We develop a rubric for identifying…

Most prior research in deep imitation learning has predominantly utilized fixed cameras for image input, which constrains task performance to the predefined field of view. However, enabling a robot to actively maneuver its neck can…