Calendar
Abstract
This is the Fall 2018 Kick-Off Seminar, presenting an overview of LCSR, useful information, and an introduction to the faculty and labs. Guests: Sue Vazakas (Librarian) and Career Services
Come join us to meet fellow LCSR students and faculty while eating ice cream from the Charmery.
Abstract
The quote: “Mathematics is the art of reducing any problem to linear algebra.” by William Stein wonderfully articulates the importance of Linear Algebraic techniques in Pure Mathematics as well as in Engineering applications. I my talk I will discuss how engineering applications as well as recent questions in machine learning have led to a considerable broadening of the linear algebraic toolkit.
Bio
Edinah Gnang is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His research interests include discrete mathematics, graph theory, multilinear algebra, image analysis, and experimental math. He earned his doctorate at Rutgers University in 2013.
Abstract
There are currently over two thousand satellites catalogued on-orbit. Most of them were designed with a finite service life limited by fuel for attitude control and altitude boost. When the fuel is consumed, or a fault occurs in a satellite, we presently lack the ability to conduct on-orbit refueling and repairs. NASA’s Space Shuttle Program enabled a variety of satellite service missions, but all were performed by human spacewalks or robots controlled by crew from within the spacecraft. The most well-known examples are the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. However, the risks and cost of using astronauts make satellite servicing by humans prohibitive in all but a very few cases. NASA is currently developing the capabilities necessary to perform satellite servicing tasks telerobotically, with ground-based robot operators. The planned unmanned servicing spacecraft will be equipped with an array of sensors, remotely operated robotic arms, and servicing tools.
In the talk, I will give an overview of NASA’s past and future servicing missions and discuss the partnership between JHU’s Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and NASA’s Satellite Servicing Projects Division (SSPD) in developing novel robot control methods and robotic tools for upcoming missions. The research efforts at JHU-LCSR focus on facilitating the cutting of thermal insulation on satellites using force sensitive robotic tools and dynamical modeling of the cutting process, and improving the situational awareness of robot operators while performing complex manipulation tasks with limited visual feedback by employing mixed-reality visualization techniques.
Bio
Balazs P. Vagvolgyi is an Associate Research Scientist in the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics at the Johns Hopkins University. He holds a MSc in Computer Science. Before coming to JHU in 2006, he worked on the imaging pipeline of flat-panel interventional vascular X-ray systems at GE Healthcare. He briefly left Hopkins in 2013-2014 to build real-time imaging solutions for mobile as Chief Scientist for Spherical Inc. in San Francisco, CA. His professional interests and research focus on real-time computer vision and visualization, primarily in the context of robotics and medical interventions.
Abstract
The advent of laparoscopic cholecystectomy almost 30 years ago would change forever the way surgeons visualize and interact with target anatomy Patients continue to benefit from different yet related image guided therapies that also allow access to pathology by minimally invasive means. As we continue to depend upon images to guide and inform patient interventions it is instructive to review the advances made in surgical visualization over its recent history and look forward to issues that will need to be addressed toward optimization of interventional visualization. These issues will be reviewed from the perspective of a clinician, and not a computer scientist nor physicist with attention also paid to the often neglected topics of ergonomics and human factors considerations in surgical visualization.
Bio
Dr. Park is Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, MD and Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Park has made major advancements in the improvement of laparoscopic techniques for complex hernia repair, foregut and spleen surgery.
Previously Dr. Park was the Dr. Alex Gillis Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. Prior to this appointment, Park served as the Campbell and Jeanette Plugge Professor and Vice Chair for the Department of Surgery, the Head of the Division of General Surgery at the University of Maryland Medical Center, and the Chair of the Maryland Advanced Simulation, Training, Research, and Innovation (MASTRI) Center.
He is a member of the American Surgical Association, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada, American College of Surgeons and the College of Surgeons of Central Eastern and Southern Africa. Having a long held commitment to the training of surgeons in sub Saharan Africa, he is a past president of the Pan African Academy of Christian Surgeons (PAACS).
Currently a member of the Board of Directors of the SAGES, he has also served as the Fellowship Council’s founding President and as its Board Chair. He is editor-in-chief of Surgical Innovation. The author of over 250 scholarly articles and book chapters, he is widely published in the areas of hernia, solid organ laparoscopy, foregut surgery , surgical education, the “Operating Room of the Future” and surgical ergonomics. Dr. Park holds 20 patents and has been instrumental in the development and application of new technologies in endoscopic surgery.
Abstract
Heart failure (HF) represents a significant healthcare burden in the United States and worldwide. With a prevalence of 5.7 million in the US, HF costs the nation an estimated $30.7 billion each year. About half of people who develop HF die within 5 years of diagnosis.
Continuous monitoring of cardiac function in HF using implantable electronic devices suggests reductions in mortality, all-cause hospitalizations and HF related hospitalizations. However, most of the current monitoring approaches aim for collecting the data (heart rate, pressure, oxygen saturation, metabolites) that are derivative representations of the primary – mechanical pumping – function of the heart.
Current therapy for end-stage HF, when medical management options have been exhausted, includes heart, lung or heart-lung transplantation, or mechanical circulatory support when a donor organ is not available. Several ventricular assist devices (VADs) provide short and long-term mechanical circulatory support for either left or right ventricles, or both. The ventricles have a complex geometry and contraction pattern that involves coordinated motion of the ventricular free walls and the ventricular septum. Current VAD designs do not address these anatomic and physiologic features of the ventricles, as the VADs are designed as pumps that unload the target ventricle by rerouting blood through an artificial circuit. Moreover, blood contact with the artificial circuit necessitates permanent anticoagulation and predisposes patients to bleeding and thromboembolic complications.
We have designed 1) implantable stretchable sensors that continuously acquire myocardial strain data and 2) soft robotic VADs (SR-VADs) with ventricular septal bracing as innovative approaches to continuously monitor ventricular function and to assist native ventricular contraction in end-stage HF. We demonstrated proof of concept in large animal studies by showing that functional prototypes can be safely and rapidly implanted on a beating heart and function for several hours. Future directions include designing sensors that capture multiaxial strain signal, manufacturing soft actuators that fully mimic ventricular motion, incorporating sensors for organ-in-the-loop control and validating the approach in longer-term studies.
Bio
Nikolay V. Vasilyev graduated from Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University. He completed his residency and fellowship training in cardiovascular surgery at Bakoulev Center for Cardiovascular Surgery in Moscow, and his research fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Dr. Vasilyev currently serves as a Staff Scientist at the Department of Cardiac Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital and as an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Division of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. His research has been focused on development of image-guided beating-heart cardiovascular interventions and cardiac surgical robotics. This includes clinically driven device design, development of imaging techniques and image processing, computer modeling and simulation. To date Dr. Vasilyev has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers, five book chapters and received four patents, with four more applications are pending. He is a member of the European Association of Cardiothoracic Surgery, where he served on the International Co-Operation Committee, and a member of the American Heart Association and American Society for Artificial Internal Organs. He is a Co-Founder and a Director of a start-up company Nido Surgical Inc.
Abstract
Bats have a complex skeletal morphology, with both ball-and-socket and revolute joints that interconnect the bones and muscles to create a musculoskeletal system with over 40 degrees of freedom, some of which are passive. Replicating this biological system in a small, lightweight, low-power air vehicle is not only infeasible, but also undesirable; trajectory planning and control for such a system would be intractable, precluding any possibility for synthesizing complex agile maneuvers, or for real-time control. Thus, our goal is to design a robot whose kinematic structure is topologically much simpler than a bat’s, while still providing the ability to mimic the bat-wing morphology during flapping flight, and to find optimal trajectories that exploit the natural system dynamics, enabling effective controller design.
The kinematic design of our robot is driven by motion capture experiments using live bats. In particular, we use principal component analysis to capture the essential bat-wing shape information, and solve a nonlinear optimization problem to determine the optimal kinematic parameters for a simplified parallel kinematic wing structure. We then derive the Lagrangian dynamic equations for this system, along with a model for the aerodynamic forces. We use a shooting-based optimizer to locate physically feasible, periodic solutions to this system, and an event-based control scheme is then derived in order to track the desired trajectory. We demonstrate our results with flight experiments on our robotic bat.
Bio
Seth Hutchinson is Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. His research in robotics spans the areas of planning, sensing, and control. He has published more than 200 papers on these topics, and is coauthor of the books “Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations,” published by MIT Press, and “Robot Modeling and Control,” published by Wiley.
Hutchinson currently serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research and chairs the steering committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He was Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Conference Editorial Board (2006-2008) and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics (2008-2013).
Hutchinson is an Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Professor of ECE until 2018, serving as Associate Head for Undergraduate Affairs from 2001 to 2007. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988. Hutchinson is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Abstract
Everybody knows that adding fiducial markers to a scene will improve the performance of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) algorithms for vision-based 3D reconstruction, but nobody knows exactly how. I’ll show you several obvious ways to use markers that work poorly. Then, I’ll show you a simple but less obvious way to use them that seems to work very well.
Bio
Timothy Bretl comes from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is both an Associate Professor and the Associate Head for Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. He holds an affiliate appointment in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, where he leads a research group that works on a diverse set of projects in robotics and neuroscience (http://bretl.csl.illinois.edu/). He has also received every award for undergraduate teaching that is granted by his department, college, and campus.