Related papers: Autonomous Robotic Tissue Palpation and Abnormalit…
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…
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,…
One of the goals of computer-aided surgery is to match intraoperative data to preoperative images of the anatomy and add complementary information that can facilitate the task of surgical navigation. In this context, mechanical palpation…
This paper introduces a new method for estimating the penetration of the end effector and the parameters of a soft body using a collaborative robotic arm. This is possible using the dimensionality reduction method that simplifies the…
Ergodic control synthesizes optimal coverage behaviors over spatial distributions for nonlinear systems. However, existing formulations model the robot as a non-volumetric point, whereas in practice a robot interacts with the environment…
Knowledge of the mechanical properties of materials is required for the design and analysis of engineering products, however, the characterisation of heterogeneous properties using traditional techniques is limited by spatial resolution or…
Tissue stiffness is related to soft tissue pathologies and can be assessed through palpation or via clinical imaging systems, e.g., ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging. Typically, the image based approaches are not suitable during…
Ergodic exploration has spawned a lot of interest in mobile robotics due to its ability to design time trajectories that match desired spatial coverage statistics. However, current ergodic approaches are for continuous spaces, which require…
Autonomous robotic exploration in remote and extreme environments allows scientists to model complex transport phenomena and collective behaviors described by continuously deforming flow fields. Although these environments are naturally…
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,…
This paper presents an active search trajectory synthesis technique for autonomous mobile robots with nonlinear measurements and dynamics. The presented approach uses the ergodicity of a planned trajectory with respect to an expected…
In the context of telehealth, robotic approaches have proven a valuable solution to in-person visits in remote areas, with decreased costs for patients and infection risks. In particular, in ultrasonography, robots have the potential to…
We develop an algorithm to explore an environment to generate a measurement model for use in future localization tasks. Ergodic exploration with respect to the likelihood of a particular class of measurement (e.g., a contact detection…
Robotic palpation relies on force sensing, but force signals in soft-tissue environments are variable and cannot reliably reveal subtle subsurface features. We present a compact multimodal sensor that integrates high-resolution vision-based…
The paper presents an approach for the identification of elasto-static parameters of a robotic manipulator using the virtual experiments in a CAD environment. It is based on the numerical processing of the data extracted from the finite…
The estimation of patient-specific tissue properties in the form of model parameters is important for personalized physiological models. However, these tissue properties are spatially varying across the underlying anatomical model,…
Exploring and modeling heterogeneous elastic surfaces requires multiple interactions with the environment and a complex selection of physical material parameters. The most common approaches model deformable properties from sets of offline…
In Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), tissue scanning with imaging probes is required for subsurface visualisation to characterise the state of the tissue. However, scanning of large tissue surfaces in the presence of deformation is a…
This paper investigates performance guarantees on coverage-based ergodic exploration methods in environments containing disturbances. Ergodic exploration methods generate trajectories for autonomous robots such that time spent in each area…
This paper addresses the autonomous robot ergodicity problem for efficient environment exploration. The spatial distribution as a reference is given by a mixture of Gaussian and the mass generation of the robot is assumed to be skinny…