Robotic minimally invasive surgery offers well-documented clinical benefits, but the cost and infrastructure requirements of purpose-built platforms limit access in rural and lower-resourced facilities. Recent work has teleoperated general-purpose robots for laparoscopic tasks and in vivo procedures, but relied on hand …
Efficient and robust tracking of surgical robotic instruments is important for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, yet remains challenging due to the complexity of surgical scenes and the unconventional geometry of surgical instruments. Keypoint-based approaches are efficient, but their performance depends on re …
Improvements in human-robot physical interaction (pHRI) can have major implications for physical therapy, search and rescue, and telemedicine. However, a major challenge concerns human constraints and safety in human-robot physical experiments. Concerns about human studies also include repeatability, scalability, and p …
The neck, specifically the cervical spine, is a highly fragile and mobile part of the body with a high risk of catastrophic injury. Whether someone is injured on a battlefield, in a natural disaster, or in an athletic event, great care is always taken with the cervical spine when transporting, rolling, or moving the pa …
Tendon-driven continuum manipulators are widely used in medical applications, where accurate tip-position estimation is essential for precise navigation and instrument positioning. However, patient anatomy and procedural setup impose task-dependent unknown shaft configurations, while friction, slack, and compliance int …