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Autonomous robotic inspection, where a robot moves through its environment and inspects points of interest, has applications in industrial settings, structural health monitoring, and medicine. Planning the paths for a robot to safely and…
Surgical automation can improve the accessibility and consistency of life saving procedures. Most surgeries require separating layers of tissue to access the surgical site, and suturing to reattach incisions. These tasks involve deformable…
We focus on the task of object manipulation to an arbitrary goal pose, in which a robot is supposed to pick an assigned object to place at the goal position with a specific orientation. However, limited by the execution space of the…
Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants bias their sampling using various…
Multi-step forceful manipulation tasks, such as opening a push-and-twist childproof bottle, require a robot to make various planning choices that are substantially impacted by the requirement to exert force during the task. The robot must…
Robotic-assisted surgeries benefit both surgeons and patients, however, surgeons frequently need to adjust the endoscopic camera to achieve good viewpoints. Simultaneously controlling the camera and the surgical instruments is impossible,…
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.…
Clinically significant prostate cancer has a better chance to be sampled during ultrasound-guided biopsy procedures, if suspected lesions found in pre-operative magnetic resonance (MR) images are used as targets. However, the diagnostic…
Motion planning is a fundamental problem in autonomous robotics that requires finding a path to a specified goal that avoids obstacles and takes into account a robot's limitations and constraints. It is often desirable for this path to also…
Recent advancements in robotics have transformed industries such as manufacturing, logistics, surgery, and planetary exploration. A key challenge is developing efficient motion planning algorithms that allow robots to navigate complex…
We propose a new method for six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) autonomous camera movement for minimally invasive surgery, which, unlike previous methods, takes into account both the position and orientation information from structures in the…
Precise needle alignment is essential for percutaneous needle insertion in robotic ultrasound-guided procedures. However, inherent challenges such as speckle noise, needle-like artifacts, and low image resolution make robust needle…
As technology advances, the need for safe, efficient, and collaborative human-robot-teams has become increasingly important. One of the most fundamental collaborative tasks in any setting is the object handover. Human-to-robot handovers can…
Reliable manipulation of previously unseen objects remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous robotic systems operating in unstructured environments. In particular, robust pick-and-place planning directly from noisy and only partial…
Motion planning is a key tool that allows robots to navigate through an environment without collisions. The problem of robot motion planning has been studied in great detail over the last several decades, with researchers initially focusing…
One of the most important barriers toward a widespread use of mobile robots in unstructured and human populated work environments is the ability to plan a safe path. In this paper, we propose to delegate this activity to a human operator…
This paper addresses the problem of planning a safe (i.e., collision-free) trajectory from an initial state to a goal region when the obstacle space is a-priori unknown and is incrementally revealed online, e.g., through line-of-sight…
Purpose: Central venous catheterization (CVC) is a critical medical procedure for vascular access, hemodynamic monitoring, and life-saving interventions. Its success remains challenging due to the need for continuous ultrasound-guided…
Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants do not sample uniformly at random, and…
Precise patient positioning is fundamental to successful removal of malignant tumors during treatment of head and neck cancers. Errors in patient positioning have been known to damage critical organs and cause complications. To better…