May 26, 2013

Masters students who did rotation projects in the CHARM lab over the last quarters presented their work in a Mechanical Engineering poster session today. Well done Mark, Ashley, Erin and Sean!

May 11, 2013

Allison will present at TEDx Stanford. Tickets sold out in 20 minutes, but you can sign up to watch the free, live webcast here.

April 14-18, 2013

Andrew, Ann, Zhan Fan, and Allison attended the World Haptics Conference in Daejeon, South Korea. We presented three papers, each with a demonstration. Pictures coming soon!

April 10, 2013

Today we received our KineSys MedSim robot. This is a cable-driven large-workspace encountered-type robot/haptic device designed by our collaborators at Intelligent Automation, Inc. (IAI). The complete system will include hand-tracking, hand-aligned graphical display, and a particle jamming tactile display designed by the CHARM Lab.

April 1, 2013

The new Stanford Robotics Seminar begins this quarter with the first seminar this Friday, April 5 at 12:15 p.m. in the AI lab, Gates Blg. 1A. Details for the entire seminar series can be found at http://roboticsseminar.stanford.edu.

March 22, 2013

Baby Brynn was born to Jim and Kathie Gwilliam today! Finished his Ph.D., new job at Exponent, new baby... life couldn't get any more exciting for Jim these days.

March 22, 2013

Ryder, Michele, Ann, Ashley, and Sam presented demos of haptic paddles and teleoperation on Innovation Day at Warm Springs Elementary School. Student visitors tried to identify different virtual environments with the haptic paddles and interacted with a basic teleoperator setup while learning the difficulties associated with transparency.

February 26, 2013

The Stanford Daily featured a story about the new Stanford Robotics Club.

February 20-23, 2013

Ilana, Andrew, and Allison attended the 2013 Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR) Conference in San Diego, CA. Ilana gave an oral presentation called "Kinematic Analysis of Motor Performance in Robot-Assisted Surgery: A Preliminary Study," and Andrew presented a poster called "A Haptic Display for Medical Simulation Using Particle Jamming" Andrew's poster won a Best Poster Award at the conference. Congratulations, Andrew! (We also enjoyed great Mexican food in old town, and caught up with Will McMahan from Katherine Kuchenbecker's group at UPenn.)

February 14, 2013

The CHARM Lab celebrated Valentine's day with chocolates, cake, cham quark cards, and a special Valentine's virtual reality environment programmed by Mike Rinderknecht!

February 13, 2013

Today we picked up the parts for our research da Vinci Surgical System from Intuitive Surgical, Inc. We are looking forward to assembling the system and using it in a variety of projects.

February 7, 2013

Congratulations to Jim Gwilliam, who successfully defended his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University today!

February 4, 2013

CLAWAR is sponsoring a workshop on standards for medical robotics at Stanford University.

January 28, 2012

Our collaborator Ken Goldberg at UC Berkeley was interviewed about our National Robotics Initiative NSF grant.

January 27, 2013

We said goodbye to Yoshi Kuroda and his family. We hope to see Yoshi at EMBC 2013 in Osaka!

January 15, 2013

Allison is featured in IEEE's Women in Engineering (WIE) "I am an Engineer. I Change the World." campaign. Check out some of the newly created IEEE Women in Engineering Resources:

• The IEEETV WIE Channel: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/channels/wie/.
• The IEEE WIE short promo video sponsored by the Life Members Fund of the IEEE Foundation: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/player/html/viewer?dl=&channel=wie#changing-the-world-wie
• The IEEE WIE “I Change the World. I am an Engineer.” video sponsored by the Life Members Fund of the IEEE Foundation: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/player/html/viewer?dl=&channel=wie#i-change-the-world-i-am-an-engineer
• WIE Posters can be found at: http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/women/poster.html

January 16 & 17, 2013

Two great speakers are coming to Stanford this week. Russ Taylor on Wednesday Jan. 16 and Ken Goldberg on Thursday Jan. 17. Here are the details:

Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Interventional Medicine
Russell Taylor, Johns Hopkins University
Room: Skilling Auditorium
Time: Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 4:15pm
Abstract: This talk will discuss ongoing research at the JHU Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST ERC) to develop computer-integrated interventional systems (CIIS) that combine innovative algorithms, robotic devices, imaging systems, sensors, and human-machine interfaces to work cooperatively with surgeons in the planning and execution of surgery and other interventional procedures. The impact of CIIS on medicine in the next 20 years will be as great as that of Computer-Integrated Manufacturing on industrial production over the past 20 years. A novel partnership between human surgeons and machines, made possible by advances in computing and engineering technology, will overcome many of the limitations of traditional surgery. By extending human surgeons’ ability to plan and carry out surgical interventions more accurately and less invasively, CIIS systems will address a vital need to greatly reduce costs, improve clinical outcomes, and improve the efficiency of health care delivery.
CIIS systems combine images and other information about an individual patient with “atlas” information about human anatomy to help clinicians plan how to treat the patient. In the operating room, the patient-specific plan and model are updated using images and other real-time information. The system has a variety of means, including robots and “augmented reality” displays to assist the surgeon in carrying out the procedure safely and accurately. The same technology will be used to assist in subsequent patient follow-up and in enabling statistical quality control to help improve the overall efficacy and safety of surgery and interventions.
This talk will describe past and emerging research themes and illustrate them with examples drawn from our current research activities in medical robotics and computer-integrated interventional systems.

Cloud Robotics
Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley
Room: Gates 219
Time: Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013, 3:15pm
Abstract: "Cloud Robotics" is a new paradigm that embraces Internet mobility. James Kuffner coined the term in 2010 and Steve Cousins summarized the concept: "No robot is an island." New research is needed to design the associated algorithms and system architectures. Cloud robots have the potential to be more aware than oblivious, more social than solitary, and more like companions than tools. In June 2011, President Obama announced the U.S. National Robotics Initiative, earmarking over $70M for new research. I'll present our research in "computer assisted brachytherapy", "superhuman surgery" and "cloud based grasping."

2011-2012 Lab News