This challenge is part of the MICCAI 2021 conference. The conference will be held from September 27 – October 1, 2021, in Strasbourg, FRANCE. 

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Autonomy is the next frontier of research in robotic surgery and its aim is to improve the quality of surgical procedures in the next future.

One fundamental requirement for autonomy is advanced perception capability through vision sensors.

In this article, we propose a novel calibration technique for a surgical scenario with a da Vinci® Research Kit (dVRK) robot. Camera and robotic arms calibration are necessary to precise position and emulate expert surgeons. The novel calibration technique is tailored for RGB-D cameras.

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The 10th Edition of the Conference on New Technologies for Computer and Robot Assisted Surgery (CRAS)

CRAS 2020 is the 10th edition of this successful event, formerly labeled as a workshop, from this 10th edition onwards CRAS has graduated and will continue to move forward as a`conference’.

Surgical robotics is a key factor for the introduction of new surgical procedures not feasible otherwise, as well as for improving current procedures by providing new assistive tools that allow achieving more precision and higher surgical performances.

Robotics breaks into the Operating Room in an effective way in the XXI century and its progress, although still slow, has already reached a figure of 10.000 operation robots in hospitals worldwide. This year’s edition, coinciding with the CRAS 10th anniversary, will evidence an explosion of new surgical robots and other devices in different specialties, which, until now, were produced by very few manufacturers. This market expansion will break with the otherwise slow progress and will favor reaching a wider range of clinical centers.

In this edition communications are expected on advances in the following fields: virtual and augmented reality techniques applied to training, planning and assisted guidance; new techniques to introduce effective haptic feedback; new devices, technologies and procedures for less invasive surgery and to facilitate the execution of complex surgical tasks; and artificial intelligence for planning, guidance and autonomous operations.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for extended abstracts: 30 June 2020

Notification of acceptance: 31 July 2020

Deadline for submission of revised abstracts 14 September 2020

For information and application visit the official web site of CRAS 2020

2020 – International Conference on Automation, Control and Robots (ICACR)

ICACR 2020 is the4th International Conference on Automation, Control and Robots held in Fully Virtual style during October 11 – 13, 2020.

SARAS PROJECT CONTRIBUTION

Keynote lecture: Autonomy and cooperation in surgical robotics application related issues

Speaker: Alícia Casals Gelpí

Professor of the Automatic Control Department at Technical University of Catalonia.
Head of the Robotics and Vision Division of the Biomedical Engineering Research Centre (CREB).
Associate researcher of the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia.

ICACR 2020 Conference Proceedings (ISBN: 978-1-7281-9207-9)
Online in IEEE Xplore

For information and application visit the official web site of ICACR 2020

The 12th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR 2019) will be organized on October 24-25, 2019, by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and will take place at the Hotel Posta, Reggio Emilia, Italy.

The growing need to automate daily tasks, combined with new robot technologies, is driving the development of human-friendly robots, i.e., safe and dependable machines, operating in the close vicinity to humans or directly interacting with them in a wide range of domains. The technological shift from classical industrial robots, which are safely kept away from humans in cages, to robots that are used in close collaboration with humans, is facing major challenges that need to be overcome.

The organizing committee is composed by Federica Ferraguti and Valeria Villani (General Chairs) and Lorenzo Sabattini (Program Chair) from the ARSControl research group of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and Marcello Bonfè (Publicity Chair) from the University of Ferrara. The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers so to share knowledge on all aspects related to human-robot interaction and the introduction of robots into everyday life.

Find more details on the EVENT page

Watch the Video presentation:

The Hamlyn Symposium

• World-leading medical, research, industry & academic experts
• Leaders’ Forum on technology application in clinical practice

The Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics (HSMR) provides an annual forum for surgeons and engineers from across the globe, to network and explore the latest developments in medical robotics.

The flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, ICRA will bring together the world’s top researchers and most important companies to share ideas and advances in our field.  Many of the most important developments in robotics and automation have historically been first exposed at ICRA, and 2019 will take this trend one step further. As the practical and socio-economic impact of our field continues to expand, the role of industry-centered activities has grown and will be a critical aspect of the meeting.

Find more details on the EVENT page

WORKSHOP

“Next Generation Surgery: Seamless integration of Robotics, Machine Learning and Knowledge Representation within the operating rooms”

TOPICS:

• Motivating medical case studies
• Robotics – control and planning
• Perception, knowledge representation for reasoning and AI
• Industry

Read all details about the Workshop

PAPERS

Our Partners submitted two papers:

• “An Energy-Shared Two-Layer Approach for Multi-Master-Multi-Slave Bilateral Teleoperation Systems” – Authors: Marco Minelli, Federica Ferraguti, Nicola Piccinelli, Riccardo Muradore, Cristian Secchi
• “Tele-Echography Using a Two-Layer Teleoperation Algorithm with Energy Scaling” – Authors: Enrico Sartori, Carlo Tadiello, Cristian Secchi, Riccardo Muradore

PRIZE WINNER

Marco Minelli won the SECOND PRIZE on the “Best for the Papers for Poster Presentation” titled “Energy-shared Two-layer Bilateral Teleoperation Architecture“.

The prize is offered by Auris Health

By ©[2016] Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (©[2016] Intuitive Surgical, Inc.) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The SARAS system will be developed in three increasingly complex platforms.

Each platform implements some of the SARAS results that will be exploited and extended by the next ones.

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UPC participated in the Second MelaTX workshop held in Seville in June 6-8, 2018.

UNIVERSITAT POLITÈCNICA DE CATALUNYA (UPC) developed together with surgeons of Hospital Virgen Macarena (Seville) and Hospital Clínic (Barcelona) this training platform for the surgical training in the frame of a the workshop 2^nd MelaTx Workshop.

25 surgeons from all around Spain (10 hospitals from 10  cities) participated in the Course on 7 experimental platforms.

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Head of bioengineering Research, Center for advanced technology in health and wellbeing

Eng. D. Trojaniello is presenting new perspectives in robotic surgery: the SARAS project.

SARAS goal is to develop the next-generation of surgical robotic systems that will allow a single surgeon to execute Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgery without the need of an expert assistant surgeon.

The robot will be called solo-surgery system and will consist of a pair of cooperating and autonomous robotic arms holding surgical instruments. The SARAS system will entirely take over the role of the assistant surgeon.