About the Computational Robotics Group

The Computational Robotics Group, led by Prof. Ron Alterovitz, addresses fundamental algorithmic challenges in medical and assistive robotics. Emerging robots have the potential to perform surgical procedures beyond current clinical capabilities and to autonomously assist people in their homes with everyday tasks. We develop the algorithms required to enable medical and personal robots to safely and autonomously operate in highly unstructured, uncertain, and possibly deformable environments.

Creating motion planning algorithms for robots that operate inside homes or bodies requires addressing difficult challenges: the algorithms must simultaneously consider deformations of soft tissues, compensate for uncertainty due to human variability, guarantee safety, and integrate human expertise into the planning process. To address these challenges, we integrate and make innovative improvements to a variety of computation tools, including sampling-based planning, physically-based simulation, optimal control theory, machine learning, algorithm parallelization, medical image analysis, and human-robot interaction.

We are currently applying our new algorithms to emerging, minimally invasive medical devices such as steerable needles and tentacle-like robots that can bend around anatomical obstacles and provide physicians with minimally-invasive access to clinical targets that previously were unreachable without open surgery. We are also applying these algorithms to personal robots that can assist people with tasks of daily living, including helping elderly and disabled individuals who may not otherwise be able to live on their own.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Defense (DOD).

Projects    |    People    |    Publications    |    News    |    Contact