16 citations · 41 across the 16 of their papers we have counts for
17 papers
Continuum Robot State Estimation with Actuation Uncertainty
James M. Ferguson, Alan Kuntz, Tucker Hermans
Continuum robots are flexible, slender manipulators well suited for confined surgical environments. In these settings, unknown interaction forces and model uncertainty significantl…
Leveraging Fixed-Parameter Tractability for Robot Inspection Planning
Yosuke Mizutani, Daniel Coimbra Salomao, Alex Crane +5
Autonomous robotic inspection, where a robot moves through its environment and inspects points of interest, has applications in industrial settings, structural health monitoring, a…
DefGoalNet: Contextual Goal Learning from Demonstrations For Deformable Object Manipulation
Bao Thach, Tanner Watts, Shing-Hei Ho +2
Shape servoing, a robotic task dedicated to controlling objects to desired goal shapes, is a promising approach to deformable object manipulation. An issue arises, however, with th…
DeformerNet: Learning Bimanual Manipulation of 3D Deformable Objects
Bao Thach, Brian Y. Cho, Shing-Hei Ho +2
Applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistance require robots to reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects. Analytic mod…
Toward a Millimeter-Scale Tendon-Driven Continuum Wrist with Integrated Gripper for Microsurgical Applications
Alexandra Leavitt, Ryan Lam, Nichols Crawford Taylor +2
Microsurgery is a particularly impactful yet challenging form of surgery. Robot assisted microsurgery has the potential to improve surgical dexterity and enable precise operation o…
Interactive-Rate Supervisory Control for Arbitrarily-Routed Multi-Tendon Robots via Motion Planning
Michael Bentley, Caleb Rucker, Alan Kuntz
Tendon-driven robots, where one or more tendons under tension bend and manipulate a flexible backbone, can improve minimally invasive surgeries involving difficult-to-reach regions…
Autonomous Medical Needle Steering In Vivo
Alan Kuntz, Maxwell Emerson, Tayfun Efe Ertop +10
The use of needles to access sites within organs is fundamental to many interventional medical procedures both for diagnosis and treatment. Safe and accurate navigation of a needle…
Toward Learning Context-Dependent Tasks from Demonstration for Tendon-Driven Surgical Robots
Yixuan Huang, Michael Bentley, Tucker Hermans +1
Tendon-driven robots, a type of continuum robot, have the potential to reduce the invasiveness of surgery by enabling access to difficult-to-reach anatomical targets. In the future…
Planning Sensing Sequences for Subsurface 3D Tumor Mapping
Brian Y. Cho, Tucker Hermans, Alan Kuntz
Surgical automation has the potential to enable increased precision and reduce the per-patient workload of overburdened human surgeons. An effective automation system must be able…
Learning Visual Shape Control of Novel 3D Deformable Objects from Partial-View Point Clouds
Bao Thach, Brian Y. Cho, Alan Kuntz +1
If robots could reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects, they could find applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistanc…
DeformerNet: A Deep Learning Approach to 3D Deformable Object Manipulation
Bao Thach, Alan Kuntz, Tucker Hermans
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to 3D deformable object manipulation leveraging a deep neural network called DeformerNet. Controlling the shape of a 3D object requires a…
A Recurrent Neural Network Approach to Roll Estimation for Needle Steering
Maxwell Emerson, James M. Ferguson, Tayfun Efe Ertop +8
Steerable needles are a promising technology for delivering targeted therapies in the body in a minimally-invasive fashion, as they can curve around anatomical obstacles and hone i…
Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls
Sarvenaz Chaeibakhsh, Roya Sabbagh Novin, Tucker Hermans +2
Despite years of research into patient falls in hospital rooms, falls and related injuries remain a serious concern to patient safety. In this work, we formulate a gradient-free co…
Safer Motion Planning of Steerable Needles via a Shaft-to-Tissue Force Model
Michael Bentley, Caleb Rucker, Chakravarthy Reddy +2
Steerable needles are capable of accurately targeting difficult-to-reach clinical sites in the body. By bending around sensitive anatomical structures, steerable needles have the p…
Toward Asymptotically-Optimal Inspection Planning via Efficient Near-Optimal Graph Search
Mengyu Fu, Alan Kuntz, Oren Salzman +1
Inspection planning, the task of planning motions that allow a robot to inspect a set of points of interest, has applications in domains such as industrial, field, and medical robo…
Enabling Robots to Understand Incomplete Natural Language Instructions Using Commonsense Reasoning
Haonan Chen, Hao Tan, Alan Kuntz +2
Enabling robots to understand instructions provided via spoken natural language would facilitate interaction between robots and people in a variety of settings in homes and workpla…
Interleaving Optimization with Sampling-Based Motion Planning (IOS-MP): Combining Local Optimization with Global Exploration
Alan Kuntz, Chris Bowen, Ron Alterovitz
Computing globally optimal motion plans for a robot is challenging in part because it requires analyzing a robot's configuration space simultaneously from both a macroscopic viewpo…