Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Continuum Roboticist
TITLE OF TALK
Continuum Robots for Medical Applications
DESCRIPTION
Continuum robots have the potential to innovate across medical applications — such as accessing kidney stones through the urethra or treating brain cancer through the nose without having to open the skull. This paradigm shift entails moving beyond discrete articulated robot bodies to continuously bending ones, where softness and deformability raise major challenges and where many scientific questions remain unanswered. Compared to traditional hard-bodied robots, the high flexibility and compliance of continuum robots make designing and controlling them far more complex.
In her talk, Jessica Burgner-Kahrs will review the landscape of interventional and surgical continuum robots both in research and medical products. She will discuss advances in continuum robot design, state-of-the-art physics based and emerging learning-based modelling methods, as well as motion planning and control. She will touch on current projects at the Continuum Robotics Laboratory and elaborate on the opportunity space for next-generation medical continuum robots.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Identifying continuum robots
Describing medical use cases for continuum robots
Understanding the challenges associated with continuum robots
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. Jessica Burgner-Kahrs is an Associate Professor with the Departments of Mathematical & Computational Sciences, Computer Science, and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, the founding Director of the Continuum Robotics Laboratory, and Associate Director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada. She received her Diplom and Ph.D. in computer science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany in 2006 and 2010 respectively. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was Associate Professor with Leibniz University Hannover, Germany and a postdoctoral fellow with Vanderbilt University, USA.
Her research focus lies on continuum robotics and in particular on their design, modelling, planning and control, as well as human-robot interaction. Her fundamental robotics research is driven by applications in minimally invasive surgery and maintenance, repair, and operations. Her research was recognized with the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the Engineering Science Prize, the Lower Saxony Science Award in the category Young Researcher, and she was entitled Young Researcher of the Year 2015 in Germany. She was elected as one of the Top 40 under 40 in the category Science and Society in 2015, 2016, and 2017 by the business magazine Capital and elected one of 100 Young Global Leaders from the World Economic Forum in 2019. Jessica is a Senior member of the IEEE, a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, and serves as a senior editor for IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters.
