15 March 2018. Prof. Valdastri, director of the StormLab, is an invited speaker at Wired Health – Innovazione per la vita (Innovation for Life), the first business conference on healthcare technology hosted by Wired Italy.

Wired Health is a one day event focused on technological aspects of healthcare and well-being, as well as new lifestyles and their implications on health. Companies, startups, scientific experts and exhibitors have discussed how digital technology is changing the field, the business models, together with products, services and patients choices.

Among the world-level speakers, Storm Lab director, prof. Pietro Valdastri has been invited to give a talk about our technologies.

The event description can be found here, while the complete program of the event is here.

 

 

 

The Storm Lab is happy to announce that a brand new DaVinci® Research Kit has arrived.

The daVinci® Research Kit [1], a.k.a. dVRK, is an advanced control system, produced by Medical Motion Corporation, a spinoff of the Worchester Polytechnic Institute, Massachussetts, USA. This system allows to directly control the motion of the Intuitive Surgical daVinci® system (see our webpage on the daVinci). The embedded controller of the commercial daVinci® is designed for hospital use, where the motion of the patient-side manipulator strictly follows the motion of the joystick, handled by the surgeon. The dVRK substitutes the original controller, allowing the researchers to implement new control strategies and advanced algorithms by directly and independently controlling all the daVinci® arms.

The dVRK arrived at the Storm Lab just before Christmas 2017, now our team is configuring the system and performing the first tests on the system. The Storm Lab researchers can’t wait to start using the dVRK, the arrival of the system will open the way to many new research ideas and projects, leading to outstanding results.

 

[1] P. Kazanzides, Z. Chen, A. Deguet, G. S. Fischer, R. H. Taylor, and S. P. DiMaio, “An open-source research kit for the da Vinci(R) surgical system,” in IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2014, pp. 6434–6439

Santa Claus has arrived a bit earlier than usual this year at the STORM Lab!

Today STORM LAb has received a brand new KUKA LBR Med. This unique lightweight robot, produced by the german company KUKA AG (www.kuka.com), is the medically approved version of the well-known LBR collaborative robotic arm.
This robot is the first FDA approved general purpose robotic arm and we are very glad to announce that the STORM lab @ University of Leeds, is the first academic lab in Europe to receive one.

The LBR Med will allow the STORM lab researchers to move the experiments to the next level. Being clinically approved and collaborative (so, inherently safe) this robot can be used for clinical trials and many more purposes.

Yeah, but it is not all! Another KUKA LBR Med is arriving soon, enabling us to perform real multi-arm experiments, we are looking forward to receiving the second robot.

 

 

The Storm Lab has grown!

The team is glad to announce that new members have joined our research group. Starting from september, seven new people joined us, the Storm Lab UK is getting bigger!

The master students Lavinia Barducci and Nicola Fornarelli, both from Università di Pisa, joined us for their theses.

Lavinia is goin to work on the Magnetic Capsule project, while Nicola will be dedicated to the Magnetic local actuation platform.

Moreover, we have two new Ph.D. students: Aleks Attanasio and Giovanni Pittiglio.

Aleks carried out his MSc. in robotics engineering at Università di Genova (Genoa), where he worked on deep learning, model identification and imaging.

Giovanni recieved a MSc. from University of Pisa and a MRes from Imperial College, his fields of research is advanced nonlinear control and state estimation.

Finally, three postdoc researchers have joined the group: Manish Chauhan, James Chandler and Bruno Scaglioni

Manish recieved his Ph.D. from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova, James recieved his Ph.D in Surgical technologies from the University of Leeds, Bruno recieved his Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano where he worked on modelling, simulation and advanced control of flexible robots.