Related papers: Autonomous Robotic Tissue Palpation and Abnormalit…
This paper presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot…
Palpation, the use of touch in medical examination, is almost exclusively performed by humans. We investigate a proof of concept for an artificial palpation method based on self-supervised learning. Our key idea is that an encoder-decoder…
Physical interactive robotics, ranging from wearable devices to collaborative humanoid robots, require close coordination between mechanical design and control. However, evaluating interactive dynamics is challenging due to complex human…
Medical applications of robots are increasingly popular to objectivise and speed up the execution of several types of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. Particularly important is a class of diagnostic activities that require physical…
In this article, we present a feedback control method for tactile coverage tasks, such as cleaning or surface inspection. These tasks are challenging to plan due to complex continuous physical interactions. In these tasks, the coverage…
Computer simulation of "virtual interventions" may inform optimal valve repair for a given patient prior to intervention. However, the paucity of noninvasive methods to determine in vivo mechanical parameters of valves limits the accuracy…
The paper focuses on the calibration of elastostatic parameters of spatial anthropomorphic robots. It proposes a new strategy for optimal selection of the measurement configurations that essentially increases the efficiency of robot…
General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…
This paper develops KL-Ergodic Exploration from Equilibrium ($\text{KL-E}^3$), a method for robotic systems to integrate stability into actively generating informative measurements through ergodic exploration. Ergodic exploration enables…
Tissue deformation in ultrasound (US) imaging leads to geometrical errors when measuring tissues due to the pressure exerted by probes. Such deformation has an even larger effect on 3D US volumes as the correct compounding is limited by the…
This paper proposes a general approach to design automatic controls to manipulate elastic objects into desired shapes. The object's geometric model is defined as the shape feature based on the specific task to globally describe the…
In search and surveillance applications in robotics, it is intuitive to spatially distribute robot trajectories with respect to the probability of locating targets in the domain. Ergodic coverage is one such approach to trajectory planning…
In this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the…
Clinically, palpation is one of the important diagnostic methods to assess tumor malignancy. In laboratory research, it is well accepted that the bulk stiffness of the tumor and the surrounding tissue is closely correlated with the…
The automatic shape control of deformable objects is a challenging (and currently hot) manipulation problem due to their high-dimensional geometric features and complex physical properties. In this study, a new methodology to manipulate…
Tactile perception is important for robotic systems that interact with the world through touch. Touch is an active sense in which tactile measurements depend on the contact properties of an interaction--e.g., velocity, force,…
The purpose of this study was to develop a method for tissue elasticity imaging using tagged magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). First, we developed a cyclic pressure device that used air to remotely transmit the power to generate cyclic…
This paper addresses the problem of trajectory planning for information gathering with a dynamic and resolution-varying sensor footprint. Ergodic planning offers a principled framework that balances exploration (visiting all areas) and…
This paper presents the Dynamic Tactile Sensing System that utilizes robotic tactile sensing in conjunction with reinforcement learning to locate and characterize embedded inclusions. A dual arm robot is integrated with an optical Tactile…
This paper introduces a manipulation framework for the elastic rod, including shape representation, sensorimotor-model estimation, and shape controller. Until now, the manipulation of the elastic rod has faced several challenges: 1) shape…