LCSR Seminar: Adnan Munawar

Description

Adnan Munawar, an assistant research scientist at the Laboratory for Computational Sensing + Robotics (LCSR) at Johns Hopkins, will give a talk titled "Open Simulation Platform for Surgical Robotics Research."

Abstract:

Simulation platforms accelerate research and development by allowing rapid prototyping of concepts while saving valuable resources. There is an ever-increasing need for robust simulators for surgical robotics, as for many other fields. This talk will focus on our open-source Asynchronous Multi-Body Framework (AMBF) simulator that is being used at LCSR for several applications in surgical robotics. A common research area enabled by AMBF is reactive digital twins for surgical environments. A digital twin refers to a digital (computer/simulation) model that represents a physical environment and can provide an extra layer of safety for high-risk applications such as surgery. The reactive digital twins in AMBF can take inputs from the real world (e.g., CT/MRI imaging, robot state, force/torque data, registration, and tracking data), provide visual, haptic, and auditory feedback to the surgeon, and even regulate the control of the physical robots. While many versatile open-source simulators allow the simulation of common industrial and humanoid robots, they lack the capability for high-speed robot control interfaces, haptic feedback, and the simulation of surgical robots, which are essential requirements in the context of surgical safety. AMBF addresses these limitations and has been used for an increasing number of research applications which will be discussed in this talk.

About the speaker:

Munawar works on a broad range of research topics in medical robotics that include physics simulations, computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, surgical training, haptics, and robot control. He completed his post-doctorate at Johns Hopkins and received his doctorate and ;Master of Science (on a Fulbright fellowship) from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). At WPI, he worked as a research assistant at the Automation in Interventional Medicine (AIM) Laboratory. He also worked two summers at Transenterix, North Carolina (now Asensus Surgical) on the Advanced Research and Development team developing a new generation of medical robots.

Munawar is the author of the Asynchronous Multi-Body Framework (AMBF), an open-source software that is being used internationally across research institutions. AMBF can provide physics-based robot simulations, virtual fixtures with real-time robot control, surgical training, and synthetic data generation for artificial intelligence applications. His research using AMBF has resulted in several awards at international venues. Presently, he is leading the effort to develop real-time, safe, and context-aware control of surgical robots for critical procedures (mastoidectomy, craniosynostosis, and laminectomy) using AMBF.