Related papers: Surgical Gym: A high-performance GPU-based platfor…
Physics-based simulations have accelerated progress in robot learning for driving, manipulation, and locomotion. Yet, a fast, accurate, and robust surgical simulation environment remains a challenge. In this paper, we present…
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…
Manipulating deformable objects has long been a challenge in robotics due to its high dimensional state representation and complex dynamics. Recent success in deep reinforcement learning provides a promising direction for learning to…
This paper tackles the challenge of automatically performing realistic surgical simulations from readily available surgical videos. Recent efforts have successfully integrated physically grounded dynamics within 3D Gaussians to perform…
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…
Applying Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to complex tasks in the field of robotics has proven to be very successful in the recent years. However, most of the publications focus either on applying it to a task in simulation or to a task in…
Bionic underwater robots have demonstrated their superiority in many applications. Yet, training their intelligence for a variety of tasks that mimic the behavior of underwater creatures poses a number of challenges in practice, mainly due…
Robotic surgery represents a major breakthrough in medical interventions, which has revolutionized surgical procedures. However, the high cost and limited accessibility of robotic surgery systems pose significant challenges for training…
Dexterous manipulation with anthropomorphic robot hands remains a challenging problem in robotics because of the high-dimensional state and action spaces and complex contacts. Nevertheless, skillful closed-loop manipulation is required to…
In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of robotic reinforcement learning (RL), enabling methods that handle complex image observations, train in the real world, and incorporate auxiliary data, such as…
With the advent of robot-assisted surgery, the role of data-driven approaches to integrate statistics and machine learning is growing rapidly with prominent interests in objective surgical skill assessment. However, most existing work…
Indirect simultaneous positioning (ISP), where internal tissue points are placed at desired locations indirectly through the manipulation of boundary points, is a type of subtask frequently performed in robotic surgeries. Although…
This paper presents Gym-Ignition, a new framework to create reproducible robotic environments for reinforcement learning research. It interfaces with the new generation of Gazebo, part of the Ignition Robotics suite, which provides three…
Surgical automation holds immense potential to improve the outcome and accessibility of surgery. Recent studies use reinforcement learning to learn policies that automate different surgical tasks. However, these policies are developed…
Most Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) algorithms require a prohibitively large number of training samples for learning complex tasks. Many recent works on speeding up Deep RL have focused on distributed training and simulation. While…
Robotic assistance has significantly improved the outcomes of open microsurgery and rigid endoscopic surgery, however is yet to make an impact in flexible endoscopic neurosurgery. Some of the most common intracranial procedures for…
As surgical robots become more common, automating away some of the burden of complex direct human operation becomes ever more feasible. Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction toward generalizable automated surgical…
Rather than programming, training allows robots to achieve behaviors that generalize better and are capable to respond to real-world needs. However, such training requires a big amount of experimentation which is not always feasible for a…
Tissue manipulation is a frequently used fundamental subtask of any surgical procedures, and in some cases it may require the involvement of a surgeon's assistant. The complex dynamics of soft tissue as an unstructured environment is one of…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising solution, allowing Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) to learn optimal behaviors through trial and error. However, existing simulators lack efficient integration with RL methods, limiting training…