OVPR Seed Grant Winners
An OVPR Seed grant has been awarded for the project, "Data-Enabled Manipulation Planning and Control for Autonomous Robotic Surgical Assistant." This is a collaborative research effort involving Robotics and AI (Nilanjan Chakraborty, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering), Solid Mechanics (Kedar Kirane, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering), Human Computer Interaction (IV Ramakrishnan, Professor, Computer Science) and Surgery (Dr. Georgios Georgiakis, Department of Surgery, Renaissance School of Medicine).
The overarching vision of this research is to build a robotic surgical assistant that can assist a surgeon by autonomously performing routine surgical tasks. A key step in realizing this vision is to endow robots with the ability to interact with and manipulate soft/deformable objects to perform tasks like piercing, suturing etc. Although robotic manipulation has been studied for a few decades now, much of the literature studies manipulation of rigid objects. The study of manipulation of rigid objects is a nascent field. Thus, the scope of this seed project is to develop novel data-guided planning and control algorithms that exploit the physics of fracture of deformable objects to allow robotic arms to use tools for piercing and cutting and enabling their use for suturing and incision.