Haptics Group News
November 20, 2009
Professor Kuchenbecker spent today in Waltham, Massachusetts, which is outside of Boston. She had two missions to accomplish: take a look at the Westin hotel and visit QinetiQ North America. The 2010 IEEE Haptics Symposium is going to be held at this Westin hotel in March. KJK is the co-chair of demos, posters, and exhibits, so she needed to check out the various rooms they have available. As you can see in the photo at right, it looks like a great venue for a conference. KJK's visit to the Technology Solutions Group at QinetiQ also went really well. She gave a research talk entitled "High-Fidelity Haptic Interfaces for Real, Remote, and Virtual Environments," and she got a tour of the company's facilities, including the area where they manufacture and test Talon robots. Very cool!
November 7, 2009
KJK is in Lecco, Italy, attending the IEEE International Workshop on Haptic Audio-Visual Environments and Games (HAVE). She's there to present a paper entitled "GPU Methods for Real-Time Haptic Interaction with 3D Fluids," which she co-authored with Meng Yang, Cynthia Lu, and Alla Safonova. The keynote speech at the conference was given by Professor Eckehard Steinbach from TU Münchich. He presented his work on data reduction methods in networked haptic systems. The photo at right shows him summarizing the ideas of event-based haptics, which KJK worked on when she was a PhD student. Dr. Steinbach's group is using ideas from event-based haptics to reduce the data load in networked haptic systems.
October 23, 2009
A group of us (Will, Dorsey, KJK, Jamie, and Paul) went over to Presbyterian Medical Center today to work on one of our surgical projects. Though we had to wait for quite a while for the OR to be free, we had a good time and learned a lot. Plus, we got to wear cool bunny suits and scrubs. Many thanks to Pierre Mendoza for hosting us!
October 16, 2009
The leaking pipe has been fixed! After the furniture was disassembled, a whole bunch of facilities workers came by to replace the damaged section of pipe. You can see our nice new pipe in the left image below, and the right image shows the resulting chaos in the rest of the lab.
They had to shut off the building water for several hours in order to get this new pipe installed. Afterward, the lab carpet got cleaned up, the furniture got put back together, and we moved back in. Phew. Let's hope that pipe never starts leaking again.
October 13, 2009
Jamie, Mallory, and Ned all noticed a suspicious dripping sound in the lab today. That's never a good thing. It turns out that the pipe that runs along the back wall is leaking, which is making the carpet progressively wetter in the back right corner. Jamie heroically climbed behind the wall to move some junk that was getting wet, and he put our recycling bins there to catch the water, as you can see in the left photo below.
Operations checked out the leak, and they believe they need to replace a twenty-foot (6.096 meter) section of pipe. Thus, they need to disassemble and move all of our desks. As you can see in the above right photograph, Ian, Jacob, Mallory, PK, and KJK spent a bunch of time this afternoon moving all of our worldly belongings off of the furniture. AOE is coming tomorrow at 7am to do the disassembly. We are hoping the plumbers will be done by midnight on Wednesday. Then they'll shampoo the carpet and put all our furniture back. Things should (hopefully) be back to normal by the end of business on Friday.
All things considered, we're thankful this didn't happen before the Haptics Symposium deadline.
October 5, 2009
The lab has been very busy recently, as we've been writing two full-length research papers for the 2010 IEEE Haptics Symposium Conference. The photo at right shows the authors putting the finishing touches on their submissions on the night of the deadline. Here is the information for the papers we submitted:
Pulkit Kapur, Mallory Jensen, Laurel J. Buxbaum, Steven A. Jax, and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker. Spatially Distributed Tactile Feedback for Kinesthetic Motion Guidance.
William McMahan, Joseph M. Romano, Amal M. Abdul Rahuman, and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker. High Frequency Acceleration Feedback Significantly Increases the Realism of Haptically Rendered Textured Surfaces.
The second paper was accompanied by a three-minute-long video that Anat Bordoley put together to explain the purpose of the paper and its findings. Let's all congratulate Pulkit, Mallory, Will, Joe, Amal, and Anat on their excellent accomplishments!
September 26, 2009
The Haptics Group Barbecue (Hapticue) was today! We held it at Jamie and Elizabeth's lovely house, and a whole bunch of people from the lab attended, including current members, alumni, friends, and family.
On the recommendation of Jamie, Elizabeth, Joe, and Will, we got the food from Abner's Barbecue in Jenkintown. We picked their Big Belly Filler catering package, which includes Memphis style dry-rub ribs, barbecued chicken, beef brisket, baked beans, mashed sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, cornbread, and rolls. It was even more delicious than they had said it would be, and we had more than enough food to go around.
We set up a bunch of different games in the backyard and also gathered around a fire in the Haptics Group's new fire pit, keeping ourselves warm and toasting marshmallows for s'mores. Yum! Though we constructed a tent by the fire, rain eventually forced us indoors, where we kept ourselves busy by playing The Beatles: Rock Band. KJK's favorite song was "I Want To Hold Your Hand" - very haptic! Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the event! It was great to have everyone together to celebrate our group's success.
September 22, 2009
Today was the MEAM Department picnic. It took place in Quain Courtyard and included good food and good company. Most people from the lab attended and enjoyed the lovely sunshine. Olivia Brubaker also posted a gallery of photos from the event for everyone to enjoy. The photo at right is one of the ones that Olivia took; it shows Professor Kuchenbecker, Mallory, Pulkit, and Professor Fiene.
September 18, 2009
On Wednesday, Jamie Gewirtz presented a medical robotics/haptics project for consideration for the semester-long class project in his EAS 546 class on Engineering Entrepreneurship. The idea relates to Jamie's research work on the da Vinci surgical system by Intuitive Surgical, Inc., and it's very exciting. The class voted on all of the presented projects by selecting whom they would fund, and Jamie's proposal came out as one of the best five ideas. Having his idea chosen for the class means that Jamie and three other students will spend this semester investigating the idea and putting together a business plan around it. Very cool!
September 16, 2009
Let's all congratulate Joe, Kyle, and Jamie on getting their ICRA 2010 papers submitted last night. Here are the two papers we submitted:
Joseph M. Romano, Takashi Yoshioka, and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker. Automatic Filter Design for Synthesis of Haptic Textures from Recorded Acceleration Data.
Kyle N. Winfree, Joe M. Romano, Jamie Gewirtz, and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker. Control of a High Fidelity Ungrounded Torque Feedback Device: The iTorqU 2.1.
The first paper is Joe's texture modeling work in collaboration with Takashi Yoshioka at JHU, and the second is a condensed version of Kyle's robotics master's thesis work on the iTorqU. These papers will be reviewed in the coming months, and if they are accepted, we will have the chance to present the research at the conference, which will take place in Anchorage, Alaska, next May. Great work by everyone! Next up - the Haptics Symposium deadline on October 5....
September 11, 2009
More good news! Our flexible tool force sensing paper has been accepted to the IASTED International Conference on Robotics and Applications (RA), which will be held November 4-6, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The authors are Quentin J. Lindsey, Neil A. Tenenholtz, David I. Lee, and KJK, and the title is "Image-Enabled Force Feedback for Robotic Teleoperation of a Flexible Surgical Tool." This work started as an independent study and a project in KJK's haptics class in spring of 2008. Congratulations to Quentin and Neil for a job well done!
September 4, 2009
KJK just got back from the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR) in Switzerland. This is an excellent single-track conference that brings together great robotics researchers from around the world. There were only 92 attendees, most of whom were faculty, and the quality of the presentations and discussions was very high. Professor Kuchenbecker presented an invited paper entitled "Haptography: Capturing and Recreating the Rich Feel of Real Surfaces," which she coauthored with Joe and Will. One of the best aspects of the conference was that the session chairs had all read the papers in their session. They then started the session off by presenting a ten minute overview of the field and explaining how they thought each of the upcoming presentations fit into that overview. Another great benefit was the lovely location in Luzern, Switzerland. Overall, it was a fascinating conference to attend. We should definitely submit a paper to ISRR in 2011!
August 24, 2009
Good news! Our haptic fluid simulation paper has been accepted to the International Workshop on Haptic Audio-Visual Environments and Games (HAVE 2009). The authors are Meng Yang, Cynthia Lu, Alla Safonova, and KJK, and the title is "GPU Methods for Real-Time Haptic Interaction with 3D Fluids." This work started as a joint class project between Alla's physics-based modeling class and KJK's haptics class in spring of 2008. It will great to be able to attend this nice conference and present some of our work.
August 16, 2009
The HVAC system in the lab is getting renovated over the next two weeks! They are installing a noise attenuator, reconfiguring the vents, and moving the thermostat. We are really hopeful that these changes will make the lab a quieter and more comfortable place to work. In preparation, we had to remove all of our equipment from the desks under the vents and from all the shelves behind the whiteboard.
A group of us came in today (Sunday) to do all this pre-renovation clean up, and we went out to dinner at the Blockley Pourhouse when we finished. The desks, whiteboard, and shelves are all getting disassembled tomorrow to give the workers access to the HVAC system, and demolition starts on Tuesday. Keep your fingers crossed that the renovation goes well!
August 4, 2009
A group of students from our lab went over to the Penn Presbyterian Hospital today to learn more about the Intuitive da Vinci Surgical System. As you can see in the picture at right, we had to wear white "bunny suits" and blue bonnets in order to enter the operating room. Dr. Lee and his assistant Michelle showed us how the robot works and let each of us try it out ourselves. Very cool.
July 28, 2009
Today we gave a lab tour to ten local high school students who are on campus for Penn's IT and Robotics Summer Mentorship Program. Professor Kuchenbecker gave an overview of the research our lab does and introduced six different hands-on demos. The visitors and their three counselors then rotated around the lab in small groups and had the opportunity to try out all the demonstrations, asking questions of the students in the lab as they went. Many thanks to Jamie, Ruoyao, Will, Mallory, Pulkit, and Joe for helping out!
July 24, 2009
KJK gave another version of her Haptography talk today as a Master Lecture in the SAAST summer program. This is Penn's Summer Academy in Applied Science and Technology for high school students, and it offers concentrations in Biotechnology, Computer Graphics, Computer Science, Nanotechnology, and Robotics. There were over 100 students there, and they really enjoyed the hands-on demos afterward (until a metal tool fell into the power supply, shorted it out, and caused a small explosion, which killed the power supply and ended the demonstration session.)
July 15, 2009
Today Professor Kuchenbecker gave a public lecture at Penn entitled "Haptography: Creating Authentic Haptic Feedback from Recordings of Real Interactions." This is the same talk she gave on July 1 at the RSS Conference in Seattle, including an overview of her vision for haptography, haptic photography. All of the students in the haptics lab attended the talk, along with many students and faculty from across the Penn campus. It was great to get such a diverse group together to talk about this research project and test out the associated hands-on demonstrations.
This talk was recorded. If you want to see it, just just email Professor Kuchenbecker, and she will loan or send you a CD.
July 1, 2009
Professor Kuchenbecker has spent the last several days at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference in Seattle, Washington. The conference took place at the University of Washington, which has a truly beautiful campus, and it was a great meeting.
There was a very informative Sunday workshop on Understanding the Human Hand for Advancing Robotic Manipulation with many fascinating talks, and the tour of the UW robotics labs (especially those of Blake Hannaford and Yoky Matsuoka) was fabulous. The main part of the conference was single track, with excellent keynote addresses plus a poster session.
KJK gave the Early Career Spotlight Talk on Wednesday, July 1, which is an invited talk for a young professor. Her presentation was entitled Haptography: Creating Authentic Haptic Feedback from Recordings of Real Interactions, and she also did hands-on demonstrations of haptographic capturing and rendering systems during the poster session and immediately following her talk. Attendees really liked the idea of haptography, and KJK was honored to be able to share our research results to such a large audience in this venue.
June 25, 2009
The new website for Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) is running a story on some of our lab's research. Entitled "Healing Patients Through Robotics", it describes work we are doing to give the doctor a sense of touch during robot-assisted surgery. Cool! Here's the start of the article:
Haptic feedback, or the feeling of a surface through robotic technology, has many applications. For example, the virtual “click” of the newest Blackberry is a simple application of haptics, since users feel a button clicking that exists only in a virtual realm. In medical robotics, haptics allows surgeons to “feel” tissues and anatomy, even though they are controlling surgical robotic arms instead of being in direct contact with the patient. Research in haptics, led by Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, the Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, is enhancing and improving upon the function of current medical robots....
June 17, 2009
A program officer from the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently told Professor Kuchenbecker that they were considering reversing the funding decision on the CAREER grant proposal she submitted in July of 2008. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers grants for young professors who seek to excel in both education and research. KJK's proposal from 2008 was rated competitive but not initially funded, so it was wonderful to hear that it was being reconsidered due to the availability of stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.
As of June 17, Fastlane shows that the proposal is now recommended for an award. Very exciting! We feel very lucky to be given this opportunity and are excited to be continuing our haptography research, now with the support of the NSF. Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science also ran a news article on this award when the school first heard of this funding development. Many thanks to everyone who has helped this become a reality!
June 15, 2009
The MEAM Graduate Group met today to discuss the qualifying exams of all of the first year PhD students. We are delighted to hear that Will passed his quals. His independent study project was entitled "Haptic Display of Realistic Tool Contact Via Dynamically Compensated Control of a Dedicated Actuator," and the picture to the right shows Will demonstrating his system to Mike Carchidi during the exam. Congratulations, Will!
In other good news, Will also recently heard that his IROS paper was accepted. The paper had the same title as his independent study report, and it gives preliminary approaches and results for our haptographic rendering project. The IROS acceptance rate was about 55%, and we are looking forward to attending the conference in October.
June 15, 2009
Yaroslav Tenzer visited the lab today and gave a great talk. He is a Ph.D. student in the Mechatronics in Medicine group at Imperial College London, and he works on improving the haptic fidelity of surgical simulators. His talk was entitled "Improving the Realism of Haptic Perceptions in Virtual Arthroscopy Training," and he showed some nice results on adding vibrotactile feedback to medical simulations and designing mechanisms for increased output impedance.
June 11, 2009
Today, a few lab members made a trip to Penn's medical research facility in Glenolden, where there is an Intuitive da Vinci system available for training.
We were able to run some tests and do some measurements on the system, which was a great opportunity. Many thanks to April, Aly, and Dr. Lee for facilitating this visit!
May 14, 2009
Joe and KJK are in Kobe, Japan, for ICRA this week, and the conference is going very well.
Joe gave his talk today, entitled "The AirWand: Design and Characterization of a Large-Workspace Haptic Device." This is the research he did for his MEAM qualifying examination in his first year at Penn. As you can see in the images above, the presentation room was packed, and Joe gave a very good talk. There were lots of interesting questions afterward, and people seemed quite interested in this new approach to providing haptic feedback in large virtual environments like the SIG Center for Computer Graphics we have here at Penn. Great work, Joe!
May 12, 2009
We have just been notified that the NSF plans to fund the small HCC proposal that KJK submitted in December 2008! This proposal was entitled "Modular Tactile Feedback for Whole-Body Motion Guidance," and it was inspired by our collaboration with Laurel Buxbaum, Steve Jax, and Amanda Dawson, who work with apraxic stroke patients at Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute. This three-year project will include the development of new modular tactors that can deliver rich vibratory stimuli to a variety of locations on the user's skin, plus tactile actuation patterns for spatially distributed tactors that can intuitively guide the wearer's body movements. Congratulations to the lab on this exciting funding award.
May 8, 2009
Joe just heard that he won a $300 travel grant from GAPSA, the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly at the University of Pennsylvania. These funds will help support Joe's upcoming trip to Kobe, Japan, where he will be presenting his research on the AirWand. Congratulations Joe!
May 4, 2009
Today we had a great time visiting our sister lab at Johns Hopkins for Allison Okamura's Haptics Open House. We drove down there in two cars and joined her 530.651 class on Haptic Systems for a nice lunch.
We attended the JHU Haptics Open House, where Allison's students presented hands-on demonstrations of their semester-long projects. There were many cool demos, including a bone screw insertion simulator and an interactive museum exhibit that lets you bounce different size balls on different planets. After the open house, we were lucky to receive a lab tour from Dr. Takashi Yoshioka, with whom we are collaborating on a research project. It's great to have other haptics researchers so close by!
April 30, 2009
This year's Haptics Open House was from noon to 2pm today in the lab. Here is the flyer KJK used to advertise the event around the engineering school:
The students of the MEAM 625 class on Haptic Interfaces and several MEAM senior design teams demonstrated their projects to the public during this event. Attendees got to try out all of the following:
- Sculpt 3D shapes with a milling machine that follows your hand movements
- Play Half Life and really feel when and where your character gets shot
- Learn sign language with the assistance of a glove that guides your finger motions
- Control a virtual human arm exoskeleton with only your thoughts
- Discern the location of a spatial vibrotactile cue from a novel handheld device
- Feel what the surgical tools are touching during robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery
- Track a desired arm trajectory guided only by skin stretch feedback on your wrist
- Explore 2D images in 3D through an array of 900 movable pins designed for the blind
- Try out the FatPoodle, a foot pedal that provides four axes of motion input into a computer
- Interact with ROGER, the Rapidly Orienting Green-Eyed Robot who watches your every move
Jimmy Sastra, Peter Blacksberg, and Professor Kuchenbecker all took photographs during the event; their best images have been posted in a password-protected gallery for you to explore. Contact Professor Kuchenbecker for the password. A sampling of photos appears below.
The lab was packed for the entire duration of the Open House, and there was a line for every hands-on demonstration. Attendees included students, faculty, and staff from Penn, plus lots of people from the surrounding community. Attendees all agreed that the projects were fabulous and lots of fun to try out. Great work by everyone, especially the students!
We were also privileged to be visited by Allison Okamura and a bunch of her haptics students from Johns Hopkins University, as you can see in the above-right image. They attended the whole open house and gave us lots of great feedback and ideas on our projects.
April 25, 2009
This morning several members of the lab attended an IEEE short course taught by Dr. Ralph Hollis, a professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The workshop was entitled "Magnetic Actuators for Robotic Systems," and it was held at the Sheraton Hotel in University City.
Ralph presented four hour-long modules on the design of magnetic actuators, his minifactory project, haptics and teleoperation, and future research. It was a fascinating, information-filled course that included many great stories from Ralph's long and successful careers at IBM and CMU. The highlights were probably seeing all the wonderful magnetically actuated devices he brought along for show and tell and watching the time-lapse video he made to showcase the manufacturing process for the tiles for his minifactory floor.
April 23, 2009
Unbeknownst to us, Tuesday was Jamie's birthday. Happy birthday, Jamie! We celebrated today at lab meeting with some delicious cupcakes and nudos from Naked Chocolate Cafe, which Joe and Kyle were kind enough to get for the group.
Although it wasn't planned this way, KJK also had a birthday present to support Jamie's work in the lab. As you can see in the photos above, she bought english and metric assortments of stainless steel socket head cap screws for us to use in the lab. Now Jamie doesn't have to steal fasteners from the ModLab. What a great birthday present!
April 22, 2009
Today was RoboFest: A Celebration of Robotics at the GRASP Laboratory at Penn. RoboFest was organized as a Symposium and Open House honoring Ruzena Bajcsy, the GRASP Lab founder and Recipient of the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computers and Cognitive Science.
There was a great schedule of speakers, including Peter Allen, Allison Okamura (above left), Anthony Hoogs, Henrik Christiansen, Oussama Khatib, Pradeep Khosla, Henry Fuchs, and Ruzena Bajczy herself (above right). The midday break included posters and demonstrations by GRASP researchers. As you can see in the photos below, we showed the same four demos we took to World Haptics, and they were very well received. Even more photos are available in the password-protected Haptics Lab Highlights photo gallery. Good work by everyone!
April 17, 2009
The final presentations for MEAM senior design projects were today. There were three teams doing projects related to the Haptics Lab, and all did a great job! As shown in the below left photo, David Argudo, Haresh Tilani, Sameer Kirtane, and Amal Rahuman did a project called "Tactile Vision: Developing a Continuous, Refreshable, Tactile Display." Their proof-of-concept prototype has a 30 by 30 matrix of 4-40 screws that are driven up and down by a mobile set of four actuators. They were mentored by Ms. Suzanne Erb and advised by Prof. Kuchenbecker.
The other team that was mentored by Suzanne Erb was Sumito Ahuja and Brian Hylton, who created the "Haptic Compass," a handheld device that allows a visually impaired individual to feel the direction of North to aid in navigation. Sumito and Brian are visible in the upper right photo, interacting with the lab's third project. Matt MacMillan, Travis Van Schoyck, and Kate Chovanetz created "ROGER: The Rapidly-Orienting Green-Eyed Robot" and were co-advised by Prof. Mark Yim and Prof. Kuchenbecker. You can see Roger and this team's poster in the above right photo; he moves his head and eyes to track faces, and he makes many different expressions in response to different visual stimuli. The lab was also very proud to hear that Matt, Travis, and Kate's project won the Couloucoundis Prize for the best presentation of a senior design project - a wonderful honor. Congratulations to all the seniors!
April 16, 2009
Today we were happy to be visited by Takashi Yoshioka, a neuroscience professor from Johns Hopkins University, along with his student Graham. Takashi studies the neural mechanisms that underlie tactile perception and object recognition, which is wonderfully synergistic with the haptographic capture and rendering research we are doing.
Takashi and Graham attended part of our group meeting, and each project team gave a short explanation of their project, along with a demo (if available). The visitors were quite excited by Will's teleoperation demo because it enables the user to feel the subtle intricacies of a surface without being in direct contact with it. The visitors enjoyed lunch at the Faculty Club with KJK, Will, and Joe, and continued their research conversations through the early afternoon. We are excited to be collaborating with Takashi's group because our combined sets of knowledge will enable us to study many interesting issues in texture perception and virtual surface creation.
April 3, 2009
The group enjoyed a visit and talk by Karon MacLean today. Karon is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC), she directs the Sensory Perception and Interaction (SPIN) Research Group, and she does lots of great research on haptically enabled user interfaces. She started off her day at Penn by joining in on the MEAM 625 Haptics class to discuss her upcoming IEEE Transactions on Haptics paper (which the class had all just read) that compares parametric knob dynamic models chosen by humans with those identified by the Haptic Camera. The class really enjoyed having one of the authors present to provide context for the work and help explain relevant issues.
At 11 a.m., Karon gave a talk the GRASP seminar series. Her presentation was entitled Haptic Communication: from Abstract to Affect, and it covered general motivation for her work, haptic icons, and the haptic creature. There was good interaction with the audience during the talk, and she continued a lively discussion afterward over pizza. She spent the rest of the day meeting with other Penn faculty and hanging out in the Haptics Lab, feeling demos of our different projects and discussing the work with our students. Overall it was a great day!
April 1, 2009
In the spirit of April Fool's, one of our lab members updated the lab wiki's people page to include silly pictures of everyone except himself. Can you guess who it might have been from the screen shot at the right? These antics were discovered only a few minutes before a big lab celebration, so they provided ample excitement and laughter.
The lab party in the evening was arranged by Will, Pulkit, and Joe to give everyone the opportunity to celebrate our lab's good showing and Will's Best Demo award at World Haptics. The theme for the event was "Indian Heritage Night" - we went over to Wu and Chen, dined on delicious Indian food from Rice and Spice, and enjoyed watching "The Namesake" movie. Pulkit wore traditional Indian garb and was responsible for picking out the food and the movie.
Adding to the fun, Joe came dressed up as a native American, and Ben Cohen impersonated Indiana Jones. Congratulations again to Will for winning Best Demo - we appreciate his generosity to share some of his winnings with us in this way. Joe and PK also contributed a lot to planning and supporting the event, and it was a lot of fun. Next time, will it be "New Jersey Heritage Night" or "California Heritage Night"? We'll have to wait and see.
March 20, 2009
Will McMahan and KJK won the "Best Demonstration" award at the World Haptics Conference! The demo was entitled "Displaying Realistic Contact Accelerations Via a Dedicated Vibration Actuator," and it let participants touch a variety of surfaces through two different teleoperation controllers. The goal was to let the user feel the difference between a standard position-position controller and this same controller plus high-frequency contact vibrations, which are created by a dedicated actuator to match the accelerations experienced by the slave tool.
This award comes with a $1000 honorarium and is sponsored by Moog. Congratulations to Will! This is a wonderful accomplishment for him and for the lab.
March 20, 2009
Today was the last day of the 2009 World Haptics Conference. There were many more good talks, and KJK co-chaired a session on Haptic Modeling and Rendering.
Pulkit and Sunthar continued running their hands-on demo on the use of vibrotactile feedback for guiding arm motions, and Will continued running his demo on realistic contact accelerations. Both of these demos, along with the SlipGlove and iTorqU demos that were still running, were very well received. Great work by everyone!!! A full password-protected gallery of photos from the conference is available here.
March 19, 2009
The World Haptics Conference is going really well so far. Joe and Kyle gave their two-minute poster teasers today, and the SlipGlove and iTorqU demos were running all day, with lots of hard work by Steve, Nathan, Joe, Jamie, and Kyle.
It's great to be seeing all the new research here and sharing our work with others. We also had a great time at the conference banquet tonight. A full password-protected gallery of photos from the conference is available here.
March 18, 2009
Today was the first day of the conference. There were a lot of great talks, and Netta Gurari gave the two-minute teaser for her poster, which has Allison Okamura and KJK as co-authors.
At the end of the day, all the Penn hapticians went out to dinner at Squatters Pub and Brewery. It was good to share a meal together and celebrate all the hard work that got us here.
A full password-protected gallery of photos from the conference is available here.
March 17, 2009
All ten of the Penn Haptics Group members who are going to the World Haptics Conference are now in Salt Lake City. We brought all the equipment needed for our four hands-on demonstrations, and everything seems to have arrived safely.
We had a fun time visiting the University of Utah for tours of their robotics labs and attending the conference's opening reception. A full password-protected gallery of photos from the conference is available here.
March 11, 2009
To commemorate our upcoming trip to the IEEE World Haptics Conference, KJK had t-shirts made for everyone in the lab. As shown in the below photo, they are cardinal red and are discharge printed with "Penn Haptics" on the front and "GRASP Laboratory" on the back.
Kyle helped some with the graphics, and several other members of the lab offered opinions on the design. The shirts were printed by Stuart Brent of Vacord Screen Printing in Powelton Village, a short bike ride from campus. He did them for a very reasonable price in two days with no set-up fee and no rush charge. Cool. We'll be wearing them in Salt Lake City.
March 10, 2009
More great news! Joe Romano won the Fall 2008 Outstanding TA Award for the MEAM Department!
Joe was the TA for MEAM 410/510: Mechatronics, and he won this award for the initiative, enthusiasm, and dependability he brought to his work. Dr. Jonathan Fiene was the professor for the course, and he was responsible for nominating Joe for the award, which comes with a cash prize of $500. Dr. Pedro Ponte announced the award today at the MEAM Coffee Time, and the whole department celebrated Joe's great work. Congratulations, Joe!
March 10, 2009
Great news! Joe Romano won an NSF travel grant to support his participation in the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Joe is the first author of The AirWand: Design and Characterization of a Large-Workspace Haptic Device, and he will be going to Kobe, Japan, in May to present this paper. The travel grant will completely fund his roundtrip airfare (approximately $1000) and provide $500 to support two days of visits to Japanese research labs studying robotics. Congratulations, Joe! As a new lab, we very much appreciate this support.
March 6, 2009
Today was Will McMahan's birthday! Joe Romano got him a cake, and we surprised him in the lab after GRASP pizza.
Jonathan Fiene lit the candles with a MAP gas torch, and Will succeeded at blowing them all out on the first try. Happy Birthday Will!
March 6, 2009
Professor Kuchenbecker and the iTorqU 2.0 were featured on the back cover of this month's Pennsylvania Gazette, Penn's alumni magazine.
This advertisement seeks to highlight the importance of endowed assistant professor positions like the Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation position that KJK holds. In the online version of the magazine, you can see the add by selecting "Cover 4" from the drop-down menu at the top. Unfortunately, the text of the advertisement doesn't explain anything about the project, so here are some details:
The iTorqU is an ungrounded haptic interface we designed to exert controlled torques on the user's hand. It produces these torques using the gyroscopic effect, where a quickly spinning flywheel is steered in different directions. We envision it being useful for applications such as immersive gaming, upper-limb rehabilitation, and remote control of aerial vehicles.
The idea for the iTorqU came from Kyle Winfree, Jamie Gewirtz, and Bill Mather, who all took KJK's MEAM 625 class on Haptics in Spring of 2008. Kyle and Jamie are Robotics masters students, and Bill is a Ph.D. student in Mark Yim's lab. They created an initial 1-dof prototype that semester, and they worked (very hard) over the summer to create the 2-dof version you can see in the Gazette picture.
Since then, Jonathan Fiene and Joe Romano have both contributed significantly to the project; Jonathan is a lecturer in MEAM, and Joe is one of KJK's Ph.D. students. We are presenting a paper on this project, along with a hands-on demo, at the IEEE World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City later this month.
Congratulations to the students on their beautiful device!
March 5, 2009
Today the lab enjoyed a visit from Professor Jaydev Desai. Dr. Desai earned his Ph.D. here at Penn as a student with Vijay Kumar, and he is now an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Dr. Desai joined the group for lab meeting and heard short descriptions of many of the projects in the lab. He got to try several demonstrations like the SlipGlove (pictured above), and he asked lots of good questions about our projects. Later in the day, Dr. Desai gave a talk in the MEAM seminar series entitled Image-guided Surgical Robotics: From Macro-scale to Meso-scale. It was great to have another haptics / medical robotics professor on campus, and we hope to build a good relationship with Dr. Desai's lab at the University of Maryland.
March 2, 2009
If you've been around the lab lately, you surely noticed the flurry of activity in teleoperation research and paper writing. Congratulations to Quentin, Neil, and Will on their submissions to IROS 2009!
Quentin J. Lindsey, Neil A. Tenenholtz, David I. Lee, and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker. Image-Enabled Force Feedback for Robotic Teleoperation of a Flexible Surgical Tool. Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems, 2009.
William McMahan and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker. Haptic Display of Realistic Tool Contact Via Dynamically Compensated Control of a Dedicated Actuator. Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems, 2009.
February 27, 2009
Many members of the haptics group and the MEAM 625 haptics class visited the Penn Medicine Clinical Simulation Center today. A password-protected gallery of photos from the trip is available here.
The group received a tour of this new, 22,000 square-foot facility from Dr. Noel Williams, Dr. Kris Dumon, Dr. Mayank Mittal, and Daniel Hashimoto. We saw a wide range of technology currently being used for clinical simulation, including SimMan, laparoscopic box trainers, and a Mimic. There are many exciting possibilities for the use of technology (and more specifically haptics) in medical training and simulation.
February 25, 2009
Professor Kuchenbecker received some good news from Professor Ed Colgate, the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics journal. She was selected as one of three recipients of the 2008 Citation for Meritorious Service in recognition of her work as a reviewer for the journal. This award will be announced on the ToH website as well as in the next issue of 2009, and she will be receiving a printed certificate. Congratulations!
February 20, 2009
Today included two great events. On the research side, we were happy to be visited by Dr. David I. Lee, a urological surgeon at Penn's Presbyterian Hospital. He talked with a group of students about robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery.
On the fun side, Professor Kuchenbecker participated in the annual "Pie Your Professor" event, where students can donate a small amount to charity to have the privilege of throwing whipping-cream pies at members of the faculty. At least you get to wear a poncho!
February 16, 2009
A small group of lab members and haptics class students went out to the Glenolden Research Lab today. This facility has a Intuitive da Vinci Surgical System that is dedicated to training, rather than use on human patients. A password-protected gallery of photos from the trip is available here.
A general surgeon was learning how to use the system while we were there; it was interesting to talk with him about the system's ease of use. We also really enjoyed being able to test drive the da Vinci ourselves. It's a wonderful machine! Many thanks to Dr. David I. Lee, April Laskow, and the other Glenolden staff for facilitating this trip.
January 22, 2009
Joe and KJK spent most of this week at MMVR 2009, where Joe was presenting the needle puncture simulation he created for the final project in Alla Safonova's physics-based animation class. The conference was really interesting, and Joe and KJK got to meet many other people doing research in medical applications for haptics.
January 12, 2009
Pulkit and Will are spending this week at Johns Hopkins for a Winter School on Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Surgery. They are learning a whole lot and will even be taking a surgery for engineers course.
KJK also went down for a day-long celebration for the end of the ERC-CISST, where she was a postdoc with Allison Okamura from 2006 to 2007.
January 8, 2009
Professor Kuchenbecker spent today at the new Penn Medicine Clinical Simulation Center. She enjoyed meeting Dr. Mayank Mittal, seeing the facilities, and discussing possible research collaborations with Dr. Kris Dumon. In the afternoon, she got to participate in an abdominal aortic aneurysm simulation alongside two PGY-1 trainees (first year surgical residents), overseen by the Chief of Vascular Surgery at the Philadelphia VA.
The simulation took place in an authentic operating room - the entire SimCenter facility used to be the OR suite for Graduate Hospital. After donning scrubs and gloves, KJK was given the opportunity to rotate through as the scrub nurse, assistant surgeon, and surgeon. The team cut open the simulated aneurysm (distended fake rubber organ), though which was flowing simulated blood. They then attached a graft to the damaged tissue via suturing in three places.
January 7, 2009
Joe's AirWand paper was accepted to ICRA 2009. This means that he and Professor Kuchenbecker will be going to Kobe, Japan, in May. Congratulations Joe!