IEEE ICMA 2024 Conference

Keynote Speech 1

AI-Powered Surgical Robots

Yun-hui Liu, Ph.D.

Choh-Ming Li Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering

Director, T Stone Robotics Institute

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

&

Director, Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics

Email: yhliu@mae.cuhk.edu.hk

Abstract:

Surgical robotics is one of the most successful realms in robotics, distinguished by its highly active research community, exceptional benefits to healthcare system and remarkable economic gains. Extensive surgical robots, such as the da Vinci surgical system, etc., are manually controlled by surgeons to carry out the procedures. With the recent rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, it is widely believed that such tele-controlled robots will be replaced by next-generation AI-powered surgical robots that could autonomously perform surgical sub-tasks or the entire procedures. Under the support of Hong Kong Research Grant Council, we have been carrying out a 10-year research project on autonomous surgical robots, which aims at developing the fundamental technologies that lay the foundations for such autonomous surgical robots, namely AI-based perception of surgical objects and surgical field, AI-powered surgical planning and navigation based on multi-modal data fusion, surgical skill learning from expert data, and data-driven control. The technologies are also being integrated into systems, which are to be validated by experiments. This talk will introduce the project, the results we have obtained, the on-going tasks, and the future research work.

Yun-hui Liu received B. Eng. degree in Applied Dynamics from Beijing Institute of Technology, M. Eng. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Osaka University, and Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Tokyo. After working at the national Electrotechnical Laboratory of Japan as a Research Scientist, he joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 1995 and is currently Choh-Ming Li Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, the Director of the CUHK T Stone Robotics Institute, and the Director/CEO of Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics funded by the InnoHK clusters of the HKSAR government. He has published more than 500 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and was listed in the Highly Cited Authors (Engineering) by Thomson Reuters in 2013. His research interests include vision-based robotics, machine intelligence and their applications in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and constructions. Prof. Liu has received numerous research awards from international journals and international conferences in robotics and automation, and from government agencies. In recent years, he has been actively transferring robotics technologies developed at university labs to industries, and co-founded VisionNav Robotics, CornerStone Robotics, etc. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Robotics and Biomimetics and served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTION ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION. He is Fellow of IEEE, HKIE and HKAES.