Workshops at IEEE ICRA 2009

These days the IEEE ICRA conference was held in Kobe, Japan, featuring many great professionals of the field from around the world. As usual, several topical workshops preceded the conference. The ICRA Workshop on Innovation in Medical Robotics, organized by Mamoru Mitsuishi (University of Tokyo), Makoto Kaneko (Osaka University) and Alois Knoll (TU Münich) featured many interesting presentations e.g. on ultrasonic diagnostics, stiffness sensing and needle insertion.
Talks included the introduction to the latest development of the neurosurgery robot at the Tokyo University, the eye-catching self-assembling robots (ARES) from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the da Vinci replacement developed at TUM, used for surgical skill evaluation.

The second day Workshop on Advanced Sensing and Sensor Integration in Medical Robotics took place, organized by Darius Burschka, (Lab for Robotics and Embedded Systems, TU Münich), Greg Hager and Allison Okamura (Johns Hopkins University) and Rainer Konietschke (DLR). Most interesting talks covered motion compensation with robotized ultrasound probe, force control for telerobotic surgery and control of flexible robots. I also presented our latest achievements on patient motion tracking.