October 12, 2023
Above: Inbar Fried (left), Janine Hoelscher, and Ron Alterovitz
UNC Computer Science researchers received a Best Poster Award during the Data vs Model in Medical Robotics workshop held at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
IROS is one of the largest international robotics conferences, drawing more than 4,000 participants in 2023, and the medical robotics workshop drew researchers from all over the world. The Best Poster Award, sponsored by the Swiss robotics company Staubli, was only awarded to two posters submitted to the workshop.
The awarded poster covered a paper authored by UNC CS doctoral students Inbar Fried and Janine Hoelscher, as well as Associate Professor Jason Akulian from the UNC School of Medicine and UNC CS Professor Ron Alterovitz. The paper, “A Dataset of Anatomical Environments for Medical Robots: Modeling Respiratory Deformation,” presented a dataset of dynamic anatomical environments for medical robots meant to accelerate research and standardize simulation-based evaluations for new controllers, planners, and designs for medical robots.
Models of anatomical environments are important for the design, development, and testing of medical robotics systems. These models, however, can be time-consuming to build and are typically not shared widely between research groups, leading to issues comparing one model against another. The members of the Computational Robotics group, led by Alterovitz, hope that the dataset they have presented can be used to guide robot development and enhance benchmarking within the field.
The paper can be found online here.