Surgical robotics at IROS

Besides ICRA, the annual IROS is the other major conference of the IEEE RAS society. IROS2010 was held October 18-22. at the Taipei International Conference Center in Taiwan. In the past 20 years the attendance and the quality of the conference grew steadily, and there were over 1200 attendees in Taipei, around 400 students. The scientific program included 3 plenary lectures (great talks from Drs. Rolf Pfeifer, Steve Cousins and Yoshiyuki Sankai, the latter on their HAL exoskeleton), one day Robot Industry Forum, half day Robotics
Education Forum, 140 technical  sessions in 14 tracks, 17 workshops/tutorials, a huge Robot exhibition and some Robot Competitions.

There were not as many sessions on surgical robotics as at ICRA, still, medical robotics was covered by five sessions. Some of the more interesting papers:

• Implementation of an Automatic Scanning and Detection Algorithm for the Carotid Artery by an Assisted-Robotic Measurement System
• Towards an Assistive Robot That Autonomously Performs Bed Baths for Patient Hygiene
• Automatic Focusing and Robotic Scanning Mechanism for Precision Laser Ablation in Neurosurgery
• Asynchronous Force and Visual Feedback in Teleoperative Laparoscopic Surgical System
• RobOtol : From Design to Evaluation of a Robot for Middle Ear Surgery
• Master-Slave Robotic System for 3 Dimensional Needle Steering
• MICA - a New Generation of Versatile Instruments in Robotic Surgery
• Three-Dimensional Visualization of Photoelastic Stress Analysis for Catheter Insertion Robot
• Framework of Automatic Robot Surgery System Using Visual Servoing
• Quasistatic Modeling of Concentric Tube Robots with External Loads
• Image-Based Flexible Endoscope Steering
• Control of a Multiple Sections Flexible Endoscopic System
• Endovascular Navigation of a Ferromagnetic Microrobot Using MRI-Based Predictive Control
• A Study on Wire-Wire Driven Abdominal Cavity Mobile Micro Robot

I also had my paper under the title Surgical Case Identification for an Image-Guided Interventional System. I will cover my results in an upcoming post.