Buffalo Museum of Science: Surgical Robotics and Haptic Workshop

This summer we in ARMLAB hosted a series of workshops including the most recent one which took place in the second week of August in collaboration with Buffalo Museum of Science as well UB Program Development crew. The major theme of this workshop was informed as surgical robotics and haptics. The workshop was attended by 25-30 high school students from different schools mostly within Buffalo.
The primary presenters of the workshop included Dr. Venkat Krovi, who was joined by our collaborators (Dr. Frank C Mendel, Professor in Gross Anatomical Science and Dr. Sudha Garimella, Pediatrics Nephrologist) and our very own senior doctoral students -- Seung Kook (SK) and Madu.

The workshop highlighted different aspects of robotics with interesting "eye-catchy" simulations. Later, Dr. Mendel and Dr. Garimella discussed critical issues in conducting real surgeries and needle based percutaneous procedures successfully on real-life patients.The most highlighting aspect of this workshop was the interactive session between students and clinical physicians wherein the high school kids posed really challenging and interesting questions.

After the questioning session, there were demos setup that offered the students the opportunity to get hands-on with some of the tools we developed as a part of our research including bio-mechanical simulations, needle biopsy and haptic surgical simulations. The hands-on needle insertion demos along with the biopsy visualizer (CT and ultrasound scan) application proved to be the most attractive and informative. The workshop was well received both by the organizers as well as the participants. So, the last but not the least, we would like to extend our gratitude to the Buffalo Museum of Science organizers in providing us an opportunity to conduct this outreach workshop.

A day with the Da Vinci...

As a part of our collaborative research efforts, ARMLAB members visited a local hospital facility where we got an opportunity to operate the da Vinci (dV) surgical robot The morning session started with a briefing from the surgeons about device-setup, modular options, pre-surgical system checks as well as insights from their rich experiences conducting robotic surgeries. After the discussion, each of us spent some quality time operating the dV robot and honing our "surgical skills" -- to improve tool-motion coordination between different arms of the robot, needle suturing tasks, peg-transfer. More in the days to come ....

Prestigious Award for ARMLAB-ers: "The HARDONS- SIMONS Prize"

The ARMLAB members (Hrishi Shah, Sumit Tripathi, Dr.Leng Feng Lee and Dr.Venkat Krovi) bagged "2010 Hardon-Simons Prize"- an annual award given for the outstanding Computers in Education Journal paper on computational methods to commemorate the unselfish contributions of Richard C. Harden and Fred O. Simons, Jr. to the Computers in Education Division. The title of the work is "Role of Automated Symbolic Generation of Equations of Motion to Enhance Robotics Education" that was published in CoED Division of ASEE April-June 2011 Journal.
The award comprises of a Certificate and a cash prize of 400 USD to the authors. You can also find a list of previous recipients of the Harden-Simons Prize in the picture below.

"Best Poster Award" at 23rd Annual CSE Graduate Research Conference

We, in ARMLAB, get together in congratulating Priyanshu Agarwal for receiving the best poster award at 23rd 
Annual
 CSE
 Graduate 
Research
 Conference. The topic of Priyanshu's poster is "Articulated Body Pose Estimation in Monocular Video" that is based on estimating body pose parameters "on-the-fly" with a monocular video sequence. The award recognizes the tackling of a challenging problem in the field of computer vision. In this work, the authors propose the use of dynamics-based statistical motion models (particle-filtering based framework) to estimate the pose of an articulated multi-body system, solely from monocular images .
It is to be noted that Priyanshu won this award amidst a group of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) research graduates who also participated in this competition.

Tech Savvy - 2011 Robotics Workshop

As has been the tradition over the previous years, the Automation, Robotics, & Mechatronics Laboratory hosted the Robotics Workshop and Outreach Program for the third consecutive time as a part of this year's "Tech Savvy 6-Tech Savvy Girls with No Limits… Anything! Anywhere!" by working together with AAUW-Buffalo branch on March 12, 2011.  The outreach program comprised of an overview presentation of robotics/mechatronics, virtual reality/haptics, and virtual prototyping given by Dr. Krovi (click here to download PPT slides: here) and "touchy-feely" hands-on demos for workshop participants.

The session was attended by approximately 45 students from different parts of the country (split evenly into 3 sessions), who belonged mostly between 6th- 9th grade. The students were able to get hands-on experience with mechatronic-systems, mobile robots as well as interact with haptic interfaces motivating them to learn about novel applications of modern robotics and mechatronics.