Physical Phantom Biopsy on Medipoint

CONGRATULATIONS to the ARMLAB/CIS LAB group

Video of Physical Phantom Biopsy Demo

has been selected as a part of the online article on

MediPoint: Biopsy Devices - Current and Future Players

Click here to see the video.

ROAMeR at Stanford University ...

ROAMER rises like a Phoenix at the DSCC2013

Date: Oct. 23, 2013. 1530-1700 hrs Zulu

Venue: Stanford University

Goal: Demonstration in the Experimental Session of the 2013 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference (DSCC 2013), East Courtyard,  Special session TuET9

ROAMeR is a 9 DOFs reconfigurable planar mobile robot. Redundant degrees of freedom allow the robot to change its configuration while performing the desired trajectory tracking task in unstructured environments, e.g. rescue robots in the earthquake.  Moreover, the reconfigurability is of great importance in the design of future generation of Personal Electric Vehicles for intra-city  personal transportation services.

The ROAMeR was a smash hit at the Inaugural Experimental Session of the DSCC2013 – kudos go to  Javad Sovizi and  Madu Sathianarayanan (and Xiaobo Zhou behind the scenes) for making this such an unprecedented success!!

Discussion on the ROAMeR specifications

Straight line trajectory tracking

Obstacle avoidance

Turning in the limited space

National Grid Worlshop (ARMLAB)

This summer, ARMLAB hosted high school students visiting UB engineering school through National Grid summer camp program.  We offered several demonstrations of the distinguished outreaches of our Lab researches to the students in a fascinating and informative fashion to familiarize them with the new robotic technologies. They were allowed to interact with the robotic systems available in our laboratory that appeared to be not only entertaining but also assisting them understanding more technical robotic concepts. We prepared four demonstration stations (Hexapod by Aliakbar Alamdari, Surgical Haptic Simulation by Seung-kook Jun, Nao by Xiaobo Zhou and ROAMeR by Javad Sovizi) that are described in more details below.

1. 6-DOF Parallel Manipulator (Hexapod):In this station, a 6-DOF parallel manipulator (Hexapod) was introduced to the students and several translational, rotational and complex end effector movements were produced to show the capability of the system in executing complicated manipulation tasks. Throughout this session, students were familiarized with the robotic systems beyond many devices they are experiencing in their daily life, as car and airplane simulators etc.
2. Surgical Haptic Simulation: In this station, students interacted with a Phantom Omni haptic device to experience a force feedback while performing a virtual ear surgery that included both removal of the soft tissues and drilling through hard bone.  The goal of this session was to demonstrate how haptic technologies (with high-res visualization and high-fidelity feedback) can be assisting in training the surgeons.
3. Nao:One of the most interesting stations to the students was the Nao demonstration. This session displayed the state-of-the-art in humanoid robotic technology. The Nao was programmed to produce several movements that resembled human motions. In addition, taking advantage of the variety of Nao built-in sensors (auditory, visual, motions and touch), the students could interact with the Nao, resembling the human-like interactions. 
4. Reconfigurable Omnidirectional Articulated wheeled Mobile Robot  (ROAMeR): In this session, mechanical and electrical structures of the ROAMeR were described to the students. The goal of this session was to point out the benefits of the re-configurability of the ROAMeR. They could see how ROAMeR can simultaneously follow a trajectory and reconfigure to bypass the obstacles in an unstructured environment.   

This year at UB-Tech Savvy, we kicked-off our lab's annual outreach efforts with our newer and upgraded ARMLAB's robotic workshop. The workshop offered the most attractive and entertaining experiences while at the same time technically appealing to the middle- and high- school student participants.

The presentations, led by Dr.Krovi and followed by Madusudanan, familiarized the students about robotics, building mechatronic systems and info on valuable resources for being a hobby-roboticist from an early age. A notable addition from previous years' workshops include Nao- (humanoid) and Kinect-based exercises that provided the students with a glimpse of current advancements. The presentation also focused a specific section on medical robotic applications and some of important contributions made by ARMLAB in this niche area. 

As it has been the case in all our previous workshops, the hands-on sessions stole the show hands-on among the school buddies. Altogether four demonstration stations were setup as a part of this outreach effort with the aim of providing the students exciting and state-of-the-art robotic-demos including: (1) kinect-vision based mobile robot controller (by Michael Anson), (2) surgical haptic simulation (by Seung-Kook Jun) and (3) Nao (by Suren Kumar). Sheflika Prasad, a high school student who worked with our lab in the past and recently won the robotics competition (Tech Wars for Autonomous Robot category) conducted by Niagara County Community College (NCCC) received a honorable mention. The functional prototype (autonomous soccer bot) she developed as a part of the competition was also stationed for display that provided the final icing on the cake and made the day overall for us, ARMies. 

1. Autonomous Soccer Bot:

Sheflika demonstrated her autonomous bot that had the capability to sense the line-maps marked on the floor in order to autonomously carry out a operation of picking a ball, moving along a trajectory and dropping it in a target bin. 

2. Mobile Robot and Kinect: 

Mike developed an interactive app using iRobot's API and Kinect API that allows one to intuitively control the motion of the Roomba using the hand-waiving motions which are picked by using Kinect camera and transmitted as appropriate motion commands to move the Roomba to new locations. 

3. Surgical Haptic Simulation using Phantom Omni:

Seung-kook's station enabled students to perceive what is haptics (force feedback) and how it offers a valuable experience to training surgeons using high-res visualization and high-fidelity haptic feedback. The demo provided the students to conduct a virtual ear surgery using the haptic simulator that included both removal of soft tissues and drilling through a hard bone in the virtural reality environment. 

4. Nao- new member joining the ARMies:

The Nao demo, prepared by Suren, displayed the current state-of-art in humanoid robotic technology to the young-buds. The demo showed the capability of Nao in terms of its human-resemblance in motions and interactions with its variety of sensors (auditory, visual, motions and touch).

Opening of the Computer Integrated Surgery Laboratory at Univ. at Buffalo (CIS@SUNY-UB)

Collaboration between Dr. Venkat Krovi, Assoc. Professor in the MAE Department at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Dr. Pankaj Singhal, Assoc. Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has led to the inauguration of the Computer Integrated Surgery Laboratory at UB. Located in 201 E Bell Hall on UB’s North Campus, this lab will focus on contemporary issues in the area of surgical robotics, including simulation and training, quantitative skill assessment, and novel device design for medical applications. In the long-run, we hope to tackle such an array of challenging problems from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. Below you will also find a list of our publications that has either been accepted or still under review from our group.The website for the CIS lab is currently under construction. Please stay tuned to this blog for any future updates in this regard!

Journal:

1. Jun, S.-K., Sathia Narayanan, M., Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, Corso, J. J. and Krovi, V., “Evaluation of Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgical Skills using Motion Studies”, 2013 Journal of Robotic Surgery (to be published).

Conference: 

09. Kumar, S., Narayanan, M.S., Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, Corso, J.J., and Krovi, V., Product of Tracking Experts for Surgical Tool Visual Tracking, 2013 IEEE/ASME Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, Madison WI (submitted for review). 

08. Kumar, S., Narayanan, M.S., Eddib, A., MD, Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, and Krovi, V., “Vision-based Decision Support and Safety Systems for Robotic Surgery”, 2013 Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MedCPS), Philadephia, PA. 

07. Abber Eddib, Neha Jain, Sara Hughes, Alexander Eswar, Mehmet Erk, Caroline Michalik, Venkat Krovi, Pankaj Singhal: Influence of Morbid Obesity on Surgical Outcomes In Robotic Assisted Gynecologic Surgery.  Submited to the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 

06. Abber Eddib, Neha Jain, Sara Hughes, Alexander Eswar, Mehmet Erk, Caroline Michalik, Venkat Krovi, Pankaj Singhal: Analysis of the impact of age on the surgical outcomes after robot assisted laparoscopic hysterectomies.  Submitted. 

05. Pankaj Singhal, Wainwright Jaggernauth, Kunle Odunsi, Shashikant Lele, “Clear Cell Carcinoma of the Endometrium:  Pattern of Outcomes and Failures”. Submitted. 

04. Abber Eddib, Neha Jain, Sara Hughes, Alexander Eswar, Mehmet Erk, Caroline Michalik, Venkat Krovi, Pankaj Singhal: An analysis of the Impact of Previous Laparoscopic Hysterectomy Experience on the Learning Curve for Robotic Hysterectomy. The Journal of Robotic Surgery, Feb. 2013 

03. Seungkook Jun, Madusudanan S. Narayanan, Abeer Eddib, Pankaj Singhal, Sudha Garimella  and Venkat Krovi, Minimally Invasive Surgical Skill Assessment by Video-Motion Analysis, 5th Hamlyn Symposium 2012, Royal Geographical Society,  London, England, UK  July 2012. [Runner-up Award] 

02. Seungkook Jun, Madusudanan Narayanan, Abeer Eddib, Pankaj Singhal and Venkat Krovi, "Evaluation of Surgical Skills and Level-of-Expertise for Robotic Surgeries", 2012 Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS' 12) Workshop, Maryland, USA, Mar 20- 22, 2012. [Paper and Poster] 

01. Seungkook Jun, Madusudanan S. Narayanan, Abeer Eddib, Pankaj Singhaland Venkat Krovi, "Assessment of Surgical Skill Expertisebased on Micro-Motion Analysis", 2012 International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob' 12) Roma, Italy, Jun 24-28, 2012.