When
Thursday, November 7, 2024 - 3:30 p.m.
Michael Yip
Associate Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California - San Diego
"Teaching a Robot to Perform Surgery: From 3D Image Understanding to Deformable Manipulation"
ECE 530 | Zoom link
Abstract: Robot manipulation of rigid household objects and environments has made massive strides in the past few years due to the achievements in computer vision and reinforcement learning communities. One area that has taken off at a slower pace is in manipulating deformable objects. For example, surgical robotics are used today via teleoperation from a human-in-the-loop, but replacing the human’s visual understanding and task performance with an AI remains a lofty and puzzling challenge. How do you build intuition and control of how to deform, stretch, or cut anatomical tissue, find hemorrhages and suction blood and bodily fluids from view, or simply localize your robot within a dynamically changing and deformable world in real-time?
In this talk, I will discuss our work to automate robotic surgery and how we build new modeling and learning schemes for deformable robot manipulation and visual servoing. I will discuss how we analyze a multimodal spectrum of sensory information to solve real-to-sim and sim-to-real problems, while towing a fine line between physics-based models and the less-explainable yet highly successful latent space embeddings. I will show how this translates beyond the operating room and into general robot manipulation.
Bio: Michael Yip is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego, IEEE RAS Distinguished Lecturer, Hellman Fellow, senior member of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors, and director of the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory (ARCLab). His group currently focuses on a variety of research agendas across robotics, autonomy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. His work has been recognized through several best paper awards and nominations at ICRA and IROS, the 2017 best paper award for IEEE Robot and Automation Letters, as well as recognitions including the NSF CAREER award and the NIH Trailblazer award. Dr. Yip was previously a research associate with Disney Research and a visiting professor with Amazon Robotics. He received a BSc in mechatronics engineering from the University of Waterloo, an MS in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in bioengineering from Stanford University.