PLENARY & KEYNOTE TALKS

Abstract:

The interest in navigation and robotics in surgery and radiology continues unabated socially. In addition to scientists, start-ups of companies are also very often successful. The best known acquisitions in the last 10 years were MAKO, MAZOR, BlueBelt, atracsys, Corindus and Auris. The US company Intuitive Surgical (1995) is currently worth more on the stock market than Daimler Benz, Volkswagen or BMW. Meanwhile, the first Chinese medical robot companies such as MicroPort MedBot are also worth more on the stock market than the industrial robot company KUKA ever was.

A decisive role in the development of this technology plays, in addition to the know-how of clinical application, approval procedures (FDA/CFDA), above all a very fast conversion from the idea into a special robot/moving machine. 3D printing technology now offers low-cost printers even for high-quality medical technology plastics (PEEK) and allows very fast development cycles as well as disposable products.

The talk will present the technical development of medical robots from the beginning until today and will also address the new intravascular robotic systems in radiology and cardiology.

Biography:

Prof. Sergej Fatikow studied electrical engineering and computer science at the Ufa Aviation Technical University in Russia, where he received his doctoral degree in 1988 with work on fuzzy control of complex non-linear systems. In 1990 he moved to University of Karlsruhe in Germany, where he initiated the new research field of microrobotics. He became an assistant professor in 1996 and received his habilitation in 1999. In 2000 he accepted a professor position at the University of Kassel, Germany. A year later, he established a new Division for Microrobotics and Control Engineering (AMiR) at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Since 2001 he is a full professor in the Department of Computing Science and Head of AMiR. His research interests include micro-robotics, high-precision robotics and automation at nanoscale, nanohandling inside SEM, AFM-based robotics, sensor feedback at nanoscale, and robot control. Prof. Fatikow published three books on microrobotics and robotic manipulation at nanoscale, over 120 book chapters and journal papers. He is the Founding Chair of the flagship conference on Manipulation, Automation & Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS).

Abstract:

In this talk, we aim to present a fully autonomous and fully functional infrastructure inspection and information management system with advanced AI and multiple unmanned aerial systems (UAS) technologies. The system includes sophisticated unmanned aerial hardware platforms and software systems for automatic flight control, task and motion planning, artificial intelligent algorithms and software platform for image and infrared data processing, i.e., crack, spalling, delamination and other defect detections, and building information modeling (BIM) and management system integrated with detailed geographical information systems (GIS) and digital twin (DT) technologies. Compared with the manual inspection, the system that we have developed has the advantages of being more economical, safer, flexible and efficient. It can also be adopted for other industrial applications, including smart ocean and smart cities.

Biography:

Ben M. Chen is currently a Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Before joining CUHK in 2018, he was a Provost's Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore, where had worked for 25 years. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, in 1992–1993, and was a Software Engineer at South China Computer Corporation, China, 1983–1986. His current research interests are in unmanned systems and their applications.

Professor Chen is an IEEE Fellow and Fellow of Academy of Engineering, Singapore. He has authored/co-authored hundreds of journal and conference articles, and ten research monographs in control theory and applications, unmanned systems and financial market modeling. He has served on the editorial boards of a dozen international journals including Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He is currently serving as an Editor-in-Chief of Unmanned Systems and an Editor of International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control.