Related papers: Force Sensing in Robot-assisted Keyhole Endoscopy:…
This paper presents an improved tactile sensor using a piezoelectric bimorph able to differentiate soft materials with similar mechanical characteristics. The final aim is to develop intelligent surgical tools for brain tumour resection…
Diagnostic activities, such as ultrasound scans and palpation, are relatively low-cost. They play a crucial role in the early detection of health problems and in assessing their progression. However, they are also error-prone activities,…
Surgical robots have had clinical use since the mid 1990s. Robot-assisted surgeries offer many benefits over the conventional approach including lower risk of infection and blood loss, shorter recovery, and an overall safer procedure for…
Contact-rich manipulation remains a major challenge in robotics. Optical tactile sensors like GelSight Mini offer a low-cost solution for contact sensing by capturing soft-body deformations of the silicone gel. However, accurately inferring…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Vision-based learning from demonstrations has achieved remarkable success in enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks and high-level semantic reasoning, yet it remains insufficient for complex, contact-rich manipulation. While there is…
In this paper, we propose an algorithm that estimates contact point and force simultaneously. We consider a collaborative robot equipped with proprioceptive sensors, in particular, joint torque sensors (JTSs) and a base force/torque (F/T)…
While tremendous advances in visual and auditory realism have been made for virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), introducing a plausible sense of physicality into the virtual world remains challenging. Closing the gap between real-world…
Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…
Measurement of environment interaction forces during robotic minimally-invasive surgery would enable haptic feedback to the surgeon, thereby solving one long-standing limitation. Estimating this force from existing sensor data avoids the…
Humans have exceptional tactile sensing capabilities, which they can leverage to solve challenging, partially observable tasks that cannot be solved from visual observation alone. Research in tactile sensing attempts to unlock this new…
The potential of large tactile arrays to improve robot perception for safe operation in human-dominated environments and of high-resolution tactile arrays to enable human-level dexterous manipulation is well accepted. However, the increase…
Tactile sensors provide information that can be used to learn and execute manipulation tasks. Different tasks, however, might require different levels of sensory information; which in turn likely affect learning rates and performance. This…
To perform complex tasks, robots must be able to interact with and manipulate their surroundings. One of the key challenges in accomplishing this is robust state estimation during physical interactions, where the state involves not only the…
A central challenge in building robotic prostheses is the creation of a sensor-based system able to read physiological signals from the lower limb and instruct a robotic hand to perform various tasks. Existing systems typically perform…
Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects. Adoption…
Surgical tool segmentation in endoscopic images is the first step towards pose estimation and (sub-)task automation in challenging minimally invasive surgical operations. While many approaches in the literature have shown great results…
Recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) and tactile sensing has significantly advanced dexterous manipulation. However, these methods often utilize simplified tactile signals due to the gap between tactile simulation and the real…
Intelligent vision control systems for surgical robots should adapt to unknown and diverse objects while being robust to system disturbances. Previous methods did not meet these requirements due to mainly relying on pose estimation and…
Distinguishing the feel of smooth silk from coarse cotton is a trivial everyday task for humans. When exploring such fabrics, fingertip skin senses both spatio-temporal force patterns and texture-induced vibrations that are integrated to…