Project Related to Surgical Robotic

Autonomy and haptic-guidance

During suturing tasks performed with minimally invasive surgical robots, configuration singularities and joint limits often force surgeons to interrupt the task and re-grasp the needle using dual-arm movements. This yields an increased operator's cognitive load, time-to-completion and performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a haptic-guided shared control method for grasping the needle with the Patient Side Manipulator (PSM) of the da Vinci robot avoiding such issues. We suggest a cost function consisting of (i) the distance from robot joint limits and (ii) the task-oriented manipulability along the suturing trajectory. Evaluating the cost and its gradient on the needle grasping manifold allows us to obtain the optimal grasping pose for joint-limit and singularity free robot movements during suturing. We compute force cues and display them through the Master Tool Manipulator (MTM) to guide the surgeon towards the optimal grasp. As such, our system helps the operator to choose a grasping configuration that allows the robot to avoid joint limits and singularities during post-grasp suturing movements. We show the effectiveness of the proposed haptic-guided shared control method during suturing using both simulated and real experiments. The results illustrate that our approach significantly improves the performance in terms of needle re-grasping.

Ghalamzan et al. 2019

We have worked on Haptic-guided teleoperation across Surgical Robotic and (Nuclear) Waste Sort & Segregation domains. There are a series of works that shares technologies across these two domains, but only demonstrated in (Nuclear) Waste Sort & Segregation.

Below, you can see some of them:

Parsa et al. 2022, 'The impact of motion scaling and haptic guidance on operator's workload', 2022 The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)-- ACM CHI is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
Parsa et al. 2020, 'Haptic guided shared control grasping: collision free manipulation', IEEE CASE 2020 -- Best Paper Award Finalist
Ghalamzan et al. 2017, 'Human-In-The-Loop Optimisation: Mixed-Initiative Grasping for Optimally Facilitating Post-Grasp Manipulative Actions' Amir Masoud Ghalamzan Esfahani, Firas Abi-Farraj, Paolo Robuffo Giordano, Rustam Stolkin, IEEE IROS 2017

See some of the reltated (our) papers below:

Contact: Dr Amir Ghalamzan

IML Publications

List of works published by IML members during their work here.

2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
Conference
Journal
YearTypePublication
2022ConferenceSoran Parsa, Horia Maior, Alex Thumwood, Max Wilson, Amir Ghalamzan E. (2022). The Impact of Motion Scaling and Haptic Guidance on Operators’ Workload and Performance in Teleoperation. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (pdf) (bib)
2021Journal Amir Ghalamzan E., Kiyanoush Nazari, Hamidreza Hashempour, Fangxun Zhong (2021). Deep-LfD: Deep robot learning from demonstrations. Software Impacts, 9, pp. 100087 (link) (bib)
2020Conference Soran Parsa et al. (2020). Haptic-guided shared control grasping: collision-free manipulation. In 2020 IEEE 16th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE). (link) (bib)
2019Conference Mario Selvaggio, Amir M. Ghalamzan E, Rocco Moccia, Fanny Ficuciello, Bruno Siciliano (2019). Haptic-guided shared control for needle grasping optimization in minimally invasive robotic surgery. In 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). (link) (bib)
2018Journal Amir M. Ghalamzan E., Matteo Ragaglia (2018). Robot learning from demonstrations: Emulation learning in environments with moving obstacles. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 101, pp. 45–56 (link) (bib)
2017Conference E. Amir M. Ghalamzan, Firas Abi-Farraj, Paolo Robuffo Giordano, Rustam Stolkin (2017). Human-in-the-loop optimisation: Mixed initiative grasping for optimally facilitating post-grasp manipulative actions. In 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). (link) (bib)
2016Conference M. Talha, E. A. M. Ghalamzan, C. Takahashi, J. Kuo, W. Ingamells, R. Stolkin (2016). Towards robotic decommissioning of legacy nuclear plant: Results of human-factors experiments with tele-robotic manipulation, and a discussion of challenges and approaches for decommissioning. In 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR). (link) (bib)
2015Conference Amir M. Ghalamzan E, Chris Paxton, Gregory D. Hager, Luca Bascetta (2015). An incremental approach to learning generalizable robot tasks from human demonstration. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). (link) (bib)
2015Conference Amir M. Ghalamzan E., Luca Bascetta, Marcello Restelli, Paolo Rocco (2015). Estimating a Mean-Path from a set of 2-D curves. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). (link) (bib)
Showing 1 to 9 of 9 entries
All projects
Oxford University
University of Bristol
University of Birmingham
London Imperial College
Queen Mary University
Polytechnic University of Milan