News - Biomedical Robotics Lab

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New paper with Giulia Ballardini, Maura Casadio, and Robert Scheidt. We developed a new system for characterizing and training tactile perception, and tested it with healthy individuals and a small cohort of stroke survivors. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2018.00012/full

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ Haptics Symposium. Well done former intern Stephanie Hu for a terrific presentation in front of about 350 attendies! Well done to her coauthor and mentor Dr. Raz Leib. Ilana also had an epic reunion with the CHARM lab for a run!
Congratulations to Erez Sulimany for winning the Best Poster Award at the 14th Karniel Computational Motor Control Workshop. Excellent job also to Chen, Reut, Amit, Raz, and Lidor for presenting their posters. Congratulations also to Reut for winning the Best Poster Award at the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience annual retreat

A great sendoff party for Dr. Guy Avraham - good luck in your postdoc at UC Berkeley!

New research development project grant with our collaborator Dr. Yael Refaeli to develop a "System and Metrics for Evaluating Surgical Skill in Minimally-invasive Surgery" was awarded by ABC Robotics Initiative.
Congratulations to Reut Nomberg, Erez Sulimany and Mor Farajian for defending their MSc theses with flying colors!
Listen to Ilana's interview with Dr. Liad Mudrik and Rino Zror on Galei Tzahal (in Hebrew)

Guy's paper is on the cover of the October-December issue of Journal of Neurophysiology! Congrats!

Biomedical Robotics Lab Retreat - we opened the year at Nahal Boker and the Tzaror Mountain with fresh air and fresh ideas!

On November 01, we hosted Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro. Amit, Guy, and Chen told him about their work and showcased their robots

New papers with our collaborators at BGU Afgin O., Sagi N., Nisky I., Ganel T., and Berman S., “Visuomotor resolution in telerobotic grasping with transmission delays” is online at Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and with our collaborators at BGU and RIC Avraham G., Leib R., Pressman A., Simo L., Karniel A., Shmuelof L., Mussa-Ivaldi F.A., and Nisky I., “State-Based Delay Representation and Its Transfer from a Game of Pong to Reaching and Tracking”, accepted for publication in eNeuro

Our dVRK is up and running! Great job Lidor, Yarden, Gilat and Eli!

We wish every one a great academic year! Welcome to the lab Danit, Itamar, Asya, Hana, Mor, Liran, and Ron! Welcome also to our "old" new PhD students - Reut, Mor, and Erez!

Congratulations to Amit for winning the prestigious MOST fellowship for PhD students! Congratulations to Mor, Reut, Erez, and Danit for winning excellence fellowships! Mor won the very competitive Tzin fellowship. Erez and Reut won the Negev hitech, biotech, and chemotech fellowship. Danit won the interdisciplinary research felloship for MSc students. Erez and Danit also won the ABC Robotics fellowship, but will have to difer due to their other fellowships. Excellent job!

New papers with our collaborators from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago: Avraham G., Mawase F., Karniel A. Shmuelof L., Donchin O., Mussa-Ivaldi FA., and Nisky I., “Representing Delayed Force Feedback as a Combination of Current and Delayed States”, Journal of Neurophysiology, and Leib R., Karniel A., and Mussa-Ivaldi, "The Mechanical Representation of Temporal Delays", Scientific Reports. Congratulations Guy and Raz!

Congratulations to Dr. Guy Avraham on his PhD conferral!

Congratulations to Yarden for winning the Rector excellence award, and to Chen for winning the Dean of Engineering excellence award for their last year as undergraduate students. Also, congratulations to Yarden, Lidor, Chen, Doron, and Lital for their BSc degrees conferral. All of them graduated Cum Laude!

Biomedical Robotics Lab World Tour! Ilana, Guy, Chen, Mor, and Raz started at the Neural Control of Movement meeting at Dublin. Meanwhile, Amit represented us at the Graduate Students in Control workshop in Haifa. Then Yarden, Jacopo, and Ilana went all the way to Singapore to the IEEE ICRA conference. Yarden was one of the finalists for the Best Presentation competition at the C4 surgery workshop where she presented her interactive poster. Finally, Ilana went to Munich for the World Haptics conference where she also met Margaret Coad, a student at the Stanford CHARM lab who collaborates with us!

We love Pizza! This is great because Jacopo decided to treat everyone with a taste of a real Italian pizza. Uzi, Chillie, and Pepper were also nice to host us at Ilana's place for the occasion

Congratulations to Dr. Guy Avraham! His PhD was approved by the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies!

New paper with our collaborators from Stanford University and Intuitive Surgical accepted for presentation at the World Haptics Conference in Munich in June: Coad M.M., Okamura A.M., Wren S., Mintz Y., Lendvay T., Jarc A.M., and Nisky I. (2017) “Training in Divergent and Convergent Force Fields During a 6-DOF Manipulation Task with a Teleoperated Surgical System"

On March 19-21, Ilana was part of the Ministry of Science and Technology delegation of Israeli scientists to the China Israel China-Israel Joint Seminar on Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence Technology Cooperation. Ilana gave a talk at the seminar, visited the events of the Committee on Innovation Cooperation at the Diaoyutai State Hotel, and toured the cinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics and Institute of Automation

On March 14-16, we hosted the 13th Karniel Computational Motor Control Workshop at BGU. We had an excellent lineup of speakers. Visit the workshop website for more details and photos. Congratulations to Guy for winning the Best Poster Award!

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ISMBE conference in Haifa. Lidor presented a poster and gave a very well-received short talk. Ilana chaired the Medical Robotics session together with our collaborator Dr. David Zarrouk, and presented a talk about surgeon-centered control for robot-assisted surgery. The lab also surprised Ilana with a cake for her birthday this week!

Biomedical Robotics Lab @Zlotowski Center for Neurosience retreat in Sede-Boker. We had a great time discussing science with an amazing view by our side. Ilana chaired a session on neural technologies and representation of time, Guy presented a talk, and Chen, Amit, Yarden, and Natalie presented posters. We also welcomed our visiting student Jacopo Buzzi from Politechnico di Milano on board!

New paper with our collaborators from University of Osaka was accepted for publication: Kato G., Kuroda Y., Nisky I., Kiyokawa K., Takemura H., (in press) “Design and psychophysical evaluation of the HapSticks: A Novel Non-grounded Mechanism for Presenting Tool-mediated Vertical Forces”, IEEE Transactions on Haptics [ms]

Ilana presented a talk at the session on Israeli Robotics of the exciting T-EDGE conference in Beijing China. She talked about BGU and ABC Robotics told about our vision for how neuroscience can improve medical robotics.

Our research is featured in the inaugural issue of Science Robotics. The paper is from a collaborative project Ilana and her former postdoc advisor Allison Okamura did with the lab of Chris Gerdes in Stanford. It’s a unique take on the study of human motor learning/adaptation, examining handover from an autonomous vehicle to a human driver. The press release and additional press attention is here.

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ISFN2016 Eilat. Chen presented a talk about her study on adaptation to assymetric delay in visual feedback, Natalie presented a poster on dissasociation between perception and action in interaction with elastic objects and was one of 30 students who were selected for the Swift Competition session, and Guy presented his work on representation of error with Dr. Lior Smuelof and coauthors. Well done everyone!

Congratulations to Ilana for receiving the Toronto Award for Excellence in Research!
Biomedical Robotics Lab @SFN2016 San Diego. Guy represented the BMRL with much pride and presented a well-received poster on his work with Dr. Lior Smuelof and coauthors. He also got an opportunity for a reunion with old friends!
Welcome to our new lab members! Dr. Raz Leib is returning to the lab as a postdoc. Gilat Malka is joining as a research assistant. We also Welcome Lidor Bachar now as an MSc student.

Our recent paper by Leib et al., was featured on the cover of Journal of Neuroscience. Congratulations to Dr. Raz Leib and coauthors!

We hosted the Dutch Robotics Delegation to the Digital Life Design Festival Tel Aviv in the lab. Ilana presented a birds eye view of our research, and Amit, Mor, Erez, Reut, and Natalie presented demos of their experiments and research platforms. The visit was followed by a meetup at the residency of the Dutch Ambassador to Israel in Hertzelia.

New grant was awarded from the United Stated - Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) in collaboration with the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Psychology. In collaboration with Prof. Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago we will study "Integration of kinesthetic and tactile information in perception, action, and learning" starting from October 2016

Congratulations to Ilana for winning the Toronto Award for Excellence in Research. The award will be presented to her on November 16 in the BGU excellence in teaching and research awards ceremony.

Congratulations to Guy for winning the Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship. We wish Guy a successful research on his new postdoctoral projects!

Congratulations to Dr. Raz Leib! New paper by Leib R., Mawase F., Karniel A., Donchin O., Rothwell J., Nisky I., and Davare M. “Stimulation of PPC Affects the Mapping between Motion and Force Signals for Stiffness Perception but not Motion Control” accepted to Journal of Neuroscience. When selecting an object such as a ripe fruit or sofa, we need to assess the object’s stiffness. We found that the PPC contributes to combining position and force signals for stiffness estimation. These findings may help in developing better teleoperation systems and rehabilitation of patients with sensory impairments.
We celebrated the summer and our finishing undergraduate students with food and great company. Good luck to Doron, Lidor, Yarden, Tomer, Lital, and Chen in their future paths inside the BMRL and outside! Thank you Chen and Eviatar for hosting us in beautiful Nevatim!

Congradulations to Yarden Sharon and Chen Avraham for winning the Darom Fellowship for Excellent PhD students! They both will be starting a Direct Track PhD in the lab .

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ EuroHaptics 2016. Ilana, Natalie, and our collaborator Raz Leib attended the conference. Natalie presented a poster at the Work-in-Progress session titled “In interaction with elastic objects, the precision of action, unlike perception, improves with increasing stiffness”, and Ilana gave a talk at the "Haptic Illusions" workshop titled: "Haptic illusions - fool the mind or the hand?"

Congratulations to all our undergraduate students: Yarden, Tomer, Lital, Chen, Lidor, and Doron and their mentors Guy, Amit, and Mor for presenting their excellent talks and posters at the Biomedical Engineering projects presentations day and the Faculty of Engineering final projects conference. Congradulations to Doron and Lidor for winning the Best BME Undergraduate Project Award!

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics. Amit and Yarden presented their papers at the symposium on June 25-28 in London. Great job Yarden and Amit!
- Sharon Y., Lendvay T., Nisky I., “Instrument tip angular kinematics in teleoperated needle-driving”
- Milstein A., Mintz Y., Nisky I., “The effect of gripper scaling on grip force adjustment in robot-assisted surgery – a preliminary study”

On June 19-21, the Biomedical Robotics Lab hosted the Karniel Computational Motor Control Workshop. Amit, Chen, Guy, Yarden, Natalie, and Lital presented their posters to the guests of the workshop. Congradulations to Guy for winning the 1st place Best Poster Award! We also enjoyed a hike in the Jerusalem Mountains with the guests.

On May 24, Tomer, Mor, Reut, Amanda, Yarden, Guy, Erez, Lital, and Ilana participated in the Beer-Sheva Night Run - we had a great time, and a nice dinner at the end too!

Congratulations to current and former Biomedical Robotics Lab members for winning Biomedical Engineering department awards for excellent academic achievements! Ran Weiss, BMRL alumnus won the Department Excellence Award, and Yarden Sharon and Lital Alyagon won Appreciation Awards.
We celebrated the spring with a great dinner at Guy's place. The food was great, and thanks to Chen and Lital, we even had a robot cake for dessert!

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ ICR2016. The 2016 Israeli Robotics Conference took place on April 13-14 in Hertzelia. Amit and Natalie presented well-received talks at the ISRACAS symposium on medical robotics that was held as part of the conference, and Ilana chaired a session.

Congratulations to Amit for successfully defending his research proposal and passing the Candidacy Exam!
Biomedical Robotics Lab @ ISMBE2016. The annual meeting of the Israeli Society for Medical and Biological Engineering took place on February 24 in Haifa. Yarden, Amit, Guy, and Erez presented posters, and Ilana presented a talk and chaired an industry session where we learned from our collaborator Prof. Yoav Mintz the challenges the field of surgical robotics faces.
Biomedical Robotics Lab @ 2016 Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience Retreat. We spent 2 days in the beautiful desert of Sede Boker. Great job Erez, Guy, and Amit, who presented well accepted posters.

The Biomedical Robotics Lab joins the da Vinci Research Kit community. Our own kit is being packed these days in California, getting ready to travel all the way to Israel.

Congratulations to Guy for winning the Ben-Amitai Award for Excellent Research. He received the award today at a special ceremony with the Rector, the Dean of Engineering, the Ben-Amitai family, and his parents, Ofra and Amnon who made their way from Jerusalem on this stormy day!
Welcome Amanda Elfman, an undergraduate student from University of Virginia, who will be a research intern in the lab this Spring semester.
We are happy to congratulate Natalie Ganz and her husband Avshalom and welcome their first son Harel to the world. Harel is the first Biomedical Robotics Lab baby - looking forward for having him as a BGU student in class 2025!

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ ISFN 2015 - Guy and Ilana attended the conference in Eilat. Guy presented a well received poster, and Ilana chaired a session on Motor Systems. Our BGU colleagues Dr. Simona Bar-Haim and Shlomi Haar presented talks at this session!

Ilana was named as one of the 40 Most Promising Young People of 2015 in "The Marker" לכתבה בעיברית

On November 19, we hosted Ambassador David Quarrey, the British Ambassador to Israel in the lab. He enjoyed the demostrations of Erez, Guy, and Amit. We also had a potluck dinner at Amit's place in that evening, to celebrate the beginning of the academic year, and to welcome our newest lab member, Reut Nomberg to the lab!
On October 26, we hosted in our lab Naftali Bennet, Minister of Education, Prof. Yafa Zilbershatz, Chair of the Council of Higher Education PBC Committee, Prof. Rivka Carmi, Presiident of BGU, Prof. Zvi Hacohen, Rector, and Prof. Yossi Kost, Dean of Engineering. Ilana gave a high level overview of our research, and Guy, Hen, Amit, and Natalie delivered exciting demonstrations and explained about their research. The guests asked many questions about our research, and about how we think the higher education in Israel may be improved even further. They wrote about it @BGU.

Biomedical Robotics Lab @ SFN 2015 conference in Chicago, USA! Guy presented a well received poster at the Motor Learning Mechanisms Session. He received a scholarship from the National Institute of Psychobiology in Israel to attend the conference
Biomedical Robotics Lab @ IEEE IROS 2015 conference in Hamburg Germany! Ilana, Arun, and Amit attended the conference on September 27 - October 2. Arun presented two excellent presentations of his work from his PhD lab. Arun and Amit presented well-received posters at the second workshop on the the role of human sensorimotor control in surgical robotics that Ilana organized together with Dr. Anthony Jarc from Intuitive Surgical. Thank you ABC Robotics for supporting our trip!
Welcome Erez Sulimani, Mor Farajian, Lital Alyagon, Yarden Sharon, Hen Yehoshua, Lidor Bachar, Doron Haichal, and Tomer Zaidenberg, our new lab members. Mor and Erez will start an M.Sc. degree, and the rest will be doing their B.Sc. undergraduate projects with us. Good luck to all!
On September 9, we were happy to host Prof. Rivka Carmi, BGU President in our lab together with Ruth and Sandy Frenkel. Thank you Erez, Lital, Amit, and Arun for your presentations, and Eli for your help with the visit!

New grant was awarded from the Israeli Science Foundation to study "Human-Centered Control for Force-Reflecting Teleoperated Robot-Assisted Minimally-Invasive Surgery" starting from October 2015
On July 7, Ilana, Guy, and Amit together with a group of BGU roboticists have represented BGU at the Knesset at a meeting of the Science and Technology Committee. Ilana presented an overview of our research and the robotics research at BGU, and Amit and Guy presented a teleoperation demo.
On June 24, Erez, Ran, and Michal presented their posters at the undergraduate senior year projects conference at BGU. Congradulations on this important milestone towards graduation! Special cheers to Ran and Erez, whose project was awarded the Best BME Undergraduate Project Award!
We hosted the 11th Karniel Computational Motor Control Workshop @BGU and the Annual ABC Robotics Workshop on June 16-18. We focused on robotics on the first day, then we discussed human movement control and learning on the second, and practiced movement coordination in the desert during the hike on the third day. Arun, Amit, Guy, Erez, Ran, and Hananel gave well-received poster presentations! Congratulations to Guy, who won the 1st place Best Poster Award!

On May 26-30 Ilana attended the 2015 IEEE ICRA conference and presented a study about robot-assisted and open needle driving. She also took part in the Go, Girl, Go! forum as a Table Mentor for young girls interested in robotics!
A second workshop on the role of human sensorimotor control in surgical robotics was accepted to the 2015 IEEE IROS Conference at Hamburg, Germany. We will organize it together with Dr. Anthony Jarc from Intuitive Surgical Inc
On May 12, Ilana presented a short talk to the Ben-Gurion University Board of Governors.
On April 24, Guy presented an excellent talk titled "How Does the Sensorimotor System Represent a Delayed Velocity-Dependent Force Field?" at the 25th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neural Control of Movement in Charleston, South Carolina. He also won a scholarship from NCM to attend the meeting. Ilana also presented a poster together with collaborator Dr. Anthony Jarc from Intuitive Surgical

On March 23-24, the lab took part in the Israeli-French High Council for Science and Technology Medical Robotics Symposium. Ilana presented a talk on March 23, and we hosted a tour in our lab on March 24. Check out the event brochure.

On March 11, Ilana presented a well-received talk at the BrainTech2015 2nd International Brain Technologies Conference in the Spotlight on Israeli Translational Research session. She talked about how neuroscience and robotic surgery can move forward together.

On February 26th, we participated in the Annual meeting of the Israeli Society of Medical and Biological Engineering. Amit and Guy will presented posters about their work. Amit also presented an excellent short oral presentation as a finalist of the Best Poster Award Competition!

On February 22-23, lab members participated in the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience Annual Retreat. Congratulations to Guy who won the Best Poster Award at the retreat! We also enjoyed the beautiful views of a rainy (!) desert.

December 25, We welcome Dr. Arun Kumar Singh who joined our lab. Dr. Singh completed his PhD in IIIT Heiderbard, and will work on Robot-Assisted Surgery in a joint project with Dr. Sigal Berman and Prof. Tzvi Ganel
December 18, Congratulations to Amit for successfully defending his M.Sc. thesis!

December 7-9, Guy and Ilana attended the Israeli Society for Neuroscience meeting in Eilat. Guy presented a talk titled "Running late or running behind - sensory delay representation in the motor system", and Ilana presented a talk titled "Towards understanding surgeon motor control in robotic surgery".