Call for Contributions (Deadline extended to April 21)

An exciting full-day workshop on Force and Shape Perceptions for Surgical Instruments and Robots will be held on the 2^nd of June 2023 during the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in London. 

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) involves performing delicate operations on anatomical structures through small incisions or natural orifices along tortuous paths inside the human body. Thus, such operations give rise to constraints in accessing and operation and further technical challenges. These demand the development trends to be diverted from straight and rigid operational arms to flexible and continuum manipulators, which support broad applications with minimal trauma and facilitate the demanding clinical procedures with miniaturized instrumentation and highly curvilinear access capabilities. However, the lack of sufficient force and shape sensing/estimation techniques poses great challenges to precise and reliable motion/force control of these flexible instruments, resulting in risks for patients. Developing force and shape sensing, estimation, and display (e.g., haptic/tactile feedback interfaces) techniques is crucial for safe clinical procedures. New results and breakthroughs towards these challenges can encourage the advances in closely associated techniques of closed-loop control, path planning, surgeon–robot interaction, and safety concerns in MIS. This workshop will bring both leading engineering and clinical experts to discuss the associated clinical needs, engineering challenges, and recent progress in the field.

We invite one-page extended abstract submissions for the poster sessions of this workshop. Contributions can be novel preliminary results, recently published work, or collaborative and/or large scale projects. All submissions will be reviewed in terms of their contributions, quality, and relevance with respect to workshop (with topics listed below). Accepted submissions will be invited for a flash talk and poster display. The abstracts and posters will be published on the workshop website with authors’ permission (with an optional two-minute video summary). All posters will be evaluated for Best/Runner-up Poster Awards during the workshop. At least one author of each accepted submission has to register for at least this workshop session through the main ICRA 2023 conference website.

Topics of interest

1. Engineering Development

• Haptic force/tactile force/shape/posture sensing for surgical instruments and robots;
• Imaging-/model-/Learning-based force or shape estimation;
• Interfaces and control approaches for haptic/tactile force feedback;
• Control for medical/surgical robots based on force or shape sensing.

2. Clinical Applications

• Clinical needs and insights for the development of medical devices with force and shape perception in various surgical procedures such as endoscopic surgery, endobronchial/endovascular interventions, neurosurgery, urology, and other emerging clinical applications;
• Clinical experience of existing technologies.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions can be made through Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fw22

Extended submission deadline: 23:59 pm, April 21, 2023 (GMT Time)

Result notification: April 28, 2023 

Note that those submitted before March 31 will be notified of the results on April 7.

Organizing Committee

Dr. Lin Cao*, Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Director of ARMed Lab, the University of Sheffield, UK (*Primary Contact)

URL: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/acse/department/people/academic/lin-cao

Email: l.cao@sheffield.ac.uk

Prof. Sanja Dogramadzi, Director of Sheffield Robotics, University of Sheffield

URL: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/acse/department/people/academic/sanja-dogramadzi

Email: s.dogramadzi@sheffield.ac.uk

Prof. Chaoyang Shi, Tianjin University, China

URL: http://me.tju.edu.cn/en_faculty_teachers.action?cla=5&teacherid=1981

Email: chaoyang.shi@tju.edu.cn

Invited Speakers

Anh Nguyen, The University of Liverpool, UK

Arianna Menciassi, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

Duncan Bell, University of Suffolk

Emmanuel Vander Poorten, KU Leuven

Giulio Dagnino, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Hongliang Ren, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK, China

Iulian IORDACHITA, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, US

Jaydev Desai, Georgia Institute of Technology, US

Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, University of Toronto, Canada

Mark Thompson, Sheffield Children's Hospital, UK

Matt Carre, The University of Sheffield, UK

Pietro Valdastri, The University of Leeds, UK

Thanh Nho Do, The University of New South Wales, Australia

Venue

The conference will be held in ExCeL London, Royal Victoria Dock, 1 Western Gateway, London E16 1XL.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Dr Lin Cao at l.cao@sheffield.ac.uk.