615 Tracheal and soft tissue involving the dermis layer had adhered from the neck to the chest along the left approach track. After removing the scar tissue, the adhered site was covered with deep cervical fascia and subcutaneous fat tissue using an anti-adhesive agent. After surgery, the band-like scar tissue disappeared and symptoms improved (Fig. 2). This case involved a rare complication fr...

The paper presents a new torque-controlled lightweight robot for medical procedures developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center. Based on the experiences in lightweight robotics and anthropomorphic robotic hands, a small robot arm with 7 axis and torque-controlled joints tailored to surgical procedures has been designed. With an optimized anthropomorph...

Integrated Wireless Networks (IWN) is an important area of today’s research because of its application in comprehensive services like battlefield surveillance, traffic avoidance and control systems, mobile health monitoring, biological detection and agricultural fields, structural health monitoring, Computer-assisted rehabilitation and therapy, tele-robotic surgery, etc. IWNs are employed to co...

This work proposes an approach to remote learning of robotic cells based on Internet and simulation tools. The proposed approach, which integrates remote-learning and tele-operation into a generic scheme, is designed to enable students and developers to set up and manipulate a robotic cell remotely. Its implementation is based on a dedicated website that supports a full 3D simulation and a manu...

PURPOSE A positive surgical margin (SM) during radical prostatectomy (RP) increases risk of biochemical recurrence. We evaluated the effect of nerve-sparing procedures on risk of positive SM for pT2- and pT3-category tumors. We hypothesized that nerve sparing would increase rates of pT2 positive margins. METHODS We evaluated a historical cohort of 9,915 consecutive RP patients treated at The ...

This paper presents techniques that facilitate mobile robots to be deployed as interactive agents in populated environments such as museum exhibitions or trade shows. The mobile robots can be tele-operated over the Internet and, this way, provide remote access to distant users. Throughout this paper we describe several key techniques that have been developed in this context. To support safe and...

Novel remote operation paradigms, such as teleteaching/tele-learning, virtual laboratories, and online robots, represent challenging distributed robotic applications, where developers must deal with heterogeneous, dynamic, and highly concurrent control systems. Distributed Object Computing can be essential to cope with the complexity of such systems, offering the many advantages of the Object O...

Haptic information in robotic surgery can significantly improve clinical outcomes and help detect hard soft-tissue inclusions that indicate potential abnormalities. Visual representation of tissue stiffness information is a cost-effective technique. Meanwhile, direct force feedback, although considerably more expensive than visual representation, is an intuitive method of conveying information ...

In this paper, a novel flexible robot system with a constrained tendon-driven serpentine manipulator (CTSM) is presented. The CTSM gives the robot a larger workspace, more dexterous manipulation, and controllable stiffness compared with the da Vinci surgical robot and traditional flexible robots. The robot is tele-operated using the Novint Falcon haptic device. Two control modes are implemented...