Related papers: Surgical Robot Transformer (SRT): Imitation Learni…
Imitation learning is an effective approach for autonomous systems to acquire control policies when an explicit reward function is unavailable, using supervision provided as demonstrations from an expert, typically a human operator.…
In recent years, industrial robots have been installed in various industries to handle advanced manufacturing and high precision tasks. However, further integration of industrial robots is hampered by their limited flexibility, adaptability…
While visual imitation learning offers one of the most effective ways of learning from visual demonstrations, generalizing from them requires either hundreds of diverse demonstrations, task specific priors, or large, hard-to-train…
Robot learning requires a considerable amount of high-quality data to realize the promise of generalization. However, large data sets are costly to collect in the real world. Physics simulators can cheaply generate vast data sets with broad…
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…
Intelligent surgical robots have the potential to revolutionize clinical practice by enabling more precise and automated surgical procedures. However, the automation of such robot for surgical tasks remains under-explored compared to recent…
Optical sensing technologies are emerging technologies used in cancer surgeries to ensure the complete removal of cancerous tissue. While point-wise assessment has many potential applications, incorporating automated large area scanning…
Recent studies have demonstrated the immense potential of exploiting muscle actuator morphology for natural and robust movement -- in simulation. A validation on real robotic hardware is yet missing. In this study, we emulate muscle…
The development of algorithms for automation of subtasks during robotic surgery can be accelerated by the availability of realistic simulation environments. In this work, we focus on one aspect of the realism of a surgical simulator, which…
Research on autonomous surgery has largely focused on simple task automation in controlled environments. However, real-world surgical applications demand dexterous manipulation over extended durations and generalization to the inherent…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Purpose: Segmentation of surgical instruments in endoscopic videos is essential for automated surgical scene understanding and process modeling. However, relying on fully supervised deep learning for this task is challenging because manual…
We present a novel method for learning from demonstration 6-D tasks that can be modeled as a sequence of linear motions and compliances. The focus of this paper is the learning of a single linear primitive, many of which can be sequenced to…
Robotic surgery has been proven to offer clear advantages during surgical procedures, however, one of the major limitations is obtaining haptic feedback. Since it is often challenging to devise a hardware solution with accurate force…
As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a…
Imitation learning is an effective and safe technique to train robot policies in the real world because it does not depend on an expensive random exploration process. However, due to the lack of exploration, learning policies that…
Robotic suturing is a prototypical long-horizon dexterous manipulation task, requiring coordinated needle grasping, precise tissue penetration, and secure knot tying. Despite numerous efforts toward end-to-end autonomy, a fully autonomous…
Data scaling has revolutionized fields like natural language processing and computer vision, providing models with remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we investigate whether similar data scaling laws exist in robotics,…
Behavior cloning facilitates the learning of dexterous manipulation skills, yet the complexity of surgical environments, the difficulty and expense of obtaining patient data, and robot calibration errors present unique challenges for…
During retinal microsurgery, precise manipulation of the delicate retinal tissue is required for positive surgical outcome. However, accurate manipulation and navigation of surgical tools remain difficult due to a constrained workspace and…