Open Continuum Robotics Project

If you’ve been following our blog, you’re already familiar with our advancements in motion planning and contact-aided navigation. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of our tendon-driven continuum robot contact model, accompanied by a greedy heuristic search-based motion planner. Key Highlights: • Implementation: Available in C++ and Matlab, with a Python interface for ease of use. • Collaborative Effort: Nicholas Baldassini, undergraduate CS student at University of Toronto Mississauga, joined our lab for the summer as a software developer. He worked closely with Priyanka Rao, a PhD candidate and the first author of our contact-aided navigation work, to make the codebase accessible to everyone. • New Blog Post: Nicholas Baldassini and Priyanka Rao have co-authored a detailed blog post on this release https://lnkd.in/gFDYabc9 • Hands-On Demo: Check out our Google Colab demo workspace for a quickstart: https://lnkd.in/gQTHFKXN We’re excited to see how the community utilizes these tools. Happy coding!

Read our latest post on contact-aided navigation for continuum robots on the Open Continuum Robotics Project Blog. The avoiding obstacles paradigm in robot motion planning doesn’t make much sense for a flexible, compliant, and underactuated continuum robot. Leveraging contact with the environment can in fact increase the reachable workspace of a continuum robot! Priyanka Rao (PhD candidate, Continuum Robotics Laboratory, University of Toronto) shares her insights on how to create effective heuristics to guide a motion planning algorithm for single segment tendon-driven continuum robots. This work was recently accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters and is a collaboration with Oren Salzman (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology) and Jessica Burgner-Kahrs. https://lnkd.in/gzgEGjsT

We are thrilled to announce the latest contribution to the Open Continuum Robotics Project Blog, marking our first post of 2024 and signaling a return after a hiatus. Authored by Oren Salzman, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, this post represents his inaugural contribution to our blog, and we are delighted to welcome him as a new voice in our effort to knowledge mobilization. In his post, Oren discusses the algorithmic challenges in motion planning for minimally-invasive surgery in the context of needle steering. Did you know that the majority of proposed planners for steerable needles do not formally guarantee completeness, let alone optimality? Oren summarizes recent research efforts to covercome this major limitation. https://lnkd.in/gQ8biKrD #robotics #continuumrobotics #medicalrobotics #innovation #knowledgesharing