Seminar 2008 02 14 Medical Robotics
From CISSTwiki
CISST ERC Seminar
Medical Robotics at the Technical University Munich
Date: Thursday, February 14, 2008
Time: 1:30pm
Place: Shaffer 304 (Lunch will be served at 1:15pm)
Speaker: Alois Knoll
Technical University of Munich
Title: Medical Robotics at the Technical University Munich
Presentation: PDF, 3.3 Mbytes
Abstract
At the Technical University Munich an experimental system for minimally invasive surgery has been developed. It provides force feedback and automation of recurring tasks. The system consists of four robotic arms, which can be equipped with either minimally invasive instruments or a stereo camera. The master console provides a stereo view of the field of operation and two input devices enable force feedback to the user. We have utilized this system to assess the possibility of automating difficult handling tasks like surgical knot tying. In order to achieve this, a novel approach for human-machine skill transfer was developed. It constitutes an extension to learning by demonstration, which is a well known paradigm of robotic learning.
Bio
Alois C. Knoll received the diploma (M.Sc.) degree in Electrical/Communications Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1985 and his PhD (summa cum laude) in computer science from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, in 1988. He served on the faculty of the computer science department of TU Berlin until 1993, when he qualified for teaching computer science at a university (habilitation). He then joined the Technical Faculty of the University of Bielefeld, where he was a full professor and the director of the research group Technical Informatics until 2001. Between May 2001 and April 2004 he was a member of the board of directors of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. At AIS he was head of the research group "Robotics Construction Kits", dedicated to research and development in the area of educational robotics. Since autumn 2001 he has been a professor of Computer Science at the Computer Science Department of the Technical University of Munich. He is also on the board of directors of the Central Institute of Medical Technology at TUM (IMETUM-Garching); between April 2004 and March 2006 he was Executive Director of the Institute of Computer Science at TUM.
His research interests include cognitive, medical and sensor-based robotics, multi-agent systems, data fusion, adaptive systems and multimedia information retrieval. In these fields he has published over 200 technical papers and guest-edited international journals. He has participated (and has coordinated) several large scale national collaborative research projects (funded by the EU, the DFG, the DAAD, the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia). He initiated and was the program chairman of the First IEEE/RAS Conference on Humanoid Robots (IEEE-RAS/RSJ Humanoids2000), he was general chair of IEEE Humanoids2003 and general chair of Robotik 2004, the largest German conference on robotics, and he served on several other organising committees. Prof. Knoll is a member of the German Society for Computer Science (Gesellschaft f�r Informatik (GI)) and the IEEE.