Related papers: Efficient and Accurate Mapping of Subsurface Anato…
Surgical automation has the potential to enable increased precision and reduce the per-patient workload of overburdened human surgeons. An effective automation system must be able to sense and map subsurface anatomy, such as tumors,…
Surgical scene understanding in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) is highly reliant on visual cues and lacks tactile perception. Force-modulated surgical palpation with tactile feedback is necessary for localization,…
In this work, we develop an approach for guiding robots to automatically localize and find the shapes of tumors and other stiff inclusions present in the anatomy. Our approach uses Gaussian processes to model the stiffness distribution and…
Joint optimization of poses and features has been extensively studied and demonstrated to yield more accurate results in feature-based SLAM problems. However, research on jointly optimizing poses and non-feature-based maps remains limited.…
In this paper, we propose an optimization based SLAM approach to simultaneously optimize the robot trajectory and the occupancy map using 2D laser scans (and odometry) information. The key novelty is that the robot poses and the occupancy…
Autonomous 3D acquisition of outdoor environments poses special challenges. Different from indoor scenes, where the room space is delineated by clear boundaries and separations (e.g., walls and furniture), an outdoor environment is spacious…
Surgical resection of malignant solid tumors is critically dependent on the surgeon's ability to accurately identify pathological tissue and remove the tumor while preserving surrounding healthy structures. However, building an…
Path planning for robotic coverage is the task of determining a collision-free robot trajectory that observes all points of interest in an environment. Robots employed for such tasks are often capable of exercising active control over…
The emergence of real-time 3D ultrasound (US) makes it possible to consider image-based tracking of subcutaneous soft tissue targets for computer guided diagnosis and therapy. We propose a 3D transrectal US based tracking system for precise…
Automated patient positioning can improve radiology workflow efficiency by reducing the time required for manual table adjustments and scout-based scan planning. We propose a learning-based framework that predicts 3D organ locations and…
Acquiring an anatomical map from position data is important for medical applications where catheters interact with soft tissues. To improve autonomous navigation in these settings, we require information beyond nonparametric maps typically…
Object surface reconstruction brings essential benefits to robot grasping, object recognition, and object manipulation. When measuring the surface distribution of an unknown object by tapping, the greatest challenge is to select tapping…
On construction sites, progress must be monitored continuously to ensure that the current state corresponds to the planned state in order to increase efficiency, safety and detect construction defects at an early stage. Autonomous mobile…
Creating accurate spatial representations that take into account uncertainty is critical for autonomous robots to safely navigate in unstructured environments. Although recent LIDAR based mapping techniques can produce robust occupancy…
Currently, state-of-the-art exploration methods maintain high-resolution map representations in order to optimize exploration goals in each step that maximizes information gain. However, during exploring, those "optimal" selections could…
Statistical shape analysis is a very useful tool in a wide range of medical and biological applications. However, it typically relies on the ability to produce a relatively small number of features that can capture the relevant variability…
Autonomous navigation and exploration in unmapped environments remains a significant challenge in robotics due to the difficulty robots face in making commonsense inference of unobserved geometries. Recent advancements have demonstrated…
This paper describes the design, implementation and testing of a suite of algorithms to enable depth constrained autonomous bathymetric (underwater topography) mapping by an Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV). Given a target depth and a…
Achieving efficient remote teleoperation is particularly challenging in unknown environments, as the teleoperator must rapidly build an understanding of the site's layout. Online 3D mapping is a proven strategy to tackle this challenge, as…
Tumor saliency estimation aims to localize tumors by modeling the visual stimuli in medical images. However, it is a challenging task for breast ultrasound due to the complicated anatomic structure of the breast and poor image quality; and…