About the workshop

The field of surgical robotics has significantly grown over the past few decades to enable the use of robotic systems in various medical procedures. However, the deployment and integration of robots in the operation theatre has been hampered by issues such as safety concerns, limited sensory perception and situational awareness for the surgeon, and having to operate in hard-to-reach and confined spaces. Some of these concerns can be addressed via the design and development of novel control strategies. This workshop will bring together researchers, industry engineers, and scientists of different backgrounds and provide an opportunity to discuss challenges for designing closed-loop control strategies and control software implementation for surgical robot deployment. The goals of this workshop are to broadly engage the surgical robotics community, leverage the momentum of the existing community by presenting the latest developments in surgical robot control and implementation, and to define the roadmap for future enhancements.

Content

Dexterous robotic manipulators have rapidly become a rich and diverse area of research, with many designs and applications demonstrated. Dexterous robots can traverse confined spaces, manipulate objects in complex environments, and conform to curvilinear paths in space. Recently, there have seen increasing efforts aimed at implementing autonomous dexterous robots to push the frontiers of minimally invasive surgery. Examples include autonomous needle insertion robots for prostate brachytherapy and biopsy of tumors, concentric tube robots for beating-heart intracardiac steerable needle surgery and lung biopsy,  continuum/soft robots for resection of bladder cancer, and Natural Orifice Endoscopic Trans-luminal Surgery. 

However, there are several challenges hampering the integration of dexterous robots in operation theaters. Examples of such challenges are sensing technologies for dexterous robots, situational awareness of operators in dexterous manipulation, safe control of highly articulated multi-arm or continuum robots.  Besides technology development, the practical meaning of autonomy in dexterous surgical robots and the required technologies are the subject of intense debate and development. Current classification of surgical autonomy encompasses six basic levels: Level 0: no autonomy; Level 1: robot assistance; Level 2: task autonomy; Level 3: conditional autonomy; Level 4: high autonomy; Level 5: full autonomy. Most of the current research is focused on levels 2 and 3. In this workshop, we will discuss the surgical needs for transitioning to the high level of autonomy in dexterous robots as well as the necessary technologies required for exploring the transition from level 2 and 3 to level 4 and 5. 

From this perspective, this workshop will bring together researchers, industry engineers, and scientists of different backgrounds and provide an opportunity to discuss these issues regarding technology development for autonomous dexterous surgical . The topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

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• Image-guided control and visual servoing of surgical robots

• Dynamics models and dynamics-based controllers

• Stability, disturbance rejection, and robustness of control strategies in surgical robotics

• Cooperative or semi-autonomous control of surgical robots

• Motion planning for surgical tasks

• Force sensing and force control

• Model-less and data driven control

• Application of deep learning in control of surgical robots

• Integration of sensing techniques in control of  surgical robots

• Novel control approaches for human and surgical robot interface

• Ethics of robot autonomy

Call For Posters

We invite participants to submit short papers (2~4 pages) of relevant work via EasyChair. The accepted contributions will be posted on the workshop website but they will not appear in the official IEEE proceedings. The reviewing is single blind by a committee formed by the workshop organizers and invited speakers. The template for the contributions is IEEE RAS workshop (Latex).

The submission web page is

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icra2019-workshop.  

Accepted contributions will have the opportunity to present their work in a poster session and a 2 min presentation at the workshop. Selected contributions (short paper submitted only to the workshop) will be invited for a special issue on Journal of Medical Robotics Research 

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 15 April 2019  29 April 2019

Notification of acceptance: 10 May 2019

Camera-ready version: 15 May 2019

Workshop day: 23 May 2019 (Full Day)

Deadlines are: 11.59p.m [GMT/UTC +0]

Schedule

Rapid Presentation Schedule