
Liao WuUNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
Liao Wu
Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering
About
97
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
January 2019 - present
December 2013 - January 2016
January 2016 - January 2019
Publications
Publications (97)
A common challenge in home-based rehabilitation is muscle compensation induced by pain or fatigue, where patients with weakened primary muscles recruit secondary muscle groups to assist their movement, causing issues such as delayed rehabilitation progress or risk of further injury. In a home-based setting, the subtle compensatory actions may not b...
Follow-the-leader (FTL) motion is essential for continuum robots operating in fragile and confined environments. It allows the robot to exert minimal force on its surroundings, reducing the risk of damage. This paper presents a novel design of a snake-like robot capable of achieving FTL motion by integrating fiber jamming modules (FJMs). The propos...
Wearable sensors capable of simultaneous monitoring of multiple physiological markers have the potential to dramatically reduce healthcare cost through early detection of diseases and accelerating rehabilitation processes. These skin-like sensors can deliver significant benefits thanks to their ability to continuously track various physiological in...
Soft capacitive sensors present numerous appealing characteristics, including simple structure, low power consumption, and fast response. However, they often suffer from low sensitivity and a limited linear sensing range. Herein, a concept is presented to enhance the sensitivity and linearity of supercapacitive pressure sensors by functionally grad...
Fiber jamming modules (FJMs) offer flexibility and quick stiffness variation, making them suitable for follow-the-leader (FTL) motions in continuum robots, which is ideal for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). However, their potential has not been fully exploited, particularly in designing and manufacturing small-sized FJMs with high stiffness varia...
A common challenge in Bicep Curls rehabilitation is muscle compensation, where patients adopt alternative movement patterns when the primary muscle group cannot act due to injury or fatigue, significantly decreasing the effectiveness of rehabilitation efforts. The problem is exacerbated by the growing trend toward transitioning from in-clinic to ho...
As robotics and intelligence increasingly integrate into surgery, the pivotal role of human–robot interaction (HRI) in surgical procedures and outcomes becomes evident. However, debate rages over whether increasing robot autonomy will result in less human involvement. Some scholars assert that autonomy will reduce human participation, whereas other...
Surgical robotic systems equipped with microscale, high-dexterity manipulators have shown promising results in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). One barrier to the widespread adoption of such systems is the prohibitive cost of research and development efforts using current state-of-the-art equipment. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a...
A common limitation of autonomous tissue manipulation in robotic minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is the absence of force sensing and control at the tool level. Recently, our team has developed miniature force-sensing forceps that can simultaneously measure the grasping and pulling forces during tissue manipulation. Based on this design, here we fu...
p>Endoscopic cameras attached to miniaturised snakelike continuum robotic arms can improve dexterity, accessibility, and visibility in minimally invasive surgical tasks. This steerable camera can expand the field of view and enhance the surgical experience with additional degrees of freedom. However, it also creates more control options that compli...
p>Endoscopic cameras attached to miniaturised snakelike continuum robotic arms can improve dexterity, accessibility, and visibility in minimally invasive surgical tasks. This steerable camera can expand the field of view and enhance the surgical experience with additional degrees of freedom. However, it also creates more control options that compli...
Capacitive sensors have advanced rapidly to create new applications including wearable sensors for human health monitoring, integrated sensors for intelligent surgical devices, tactile interfaces for robots. Compared to other types of pressure or strain sensors, capacitive sensors require low power consumption and offer excellent linearity and fast...
Artificial perception technologies capable of sensing and feeling mechanical stimuli like human skins are critical enablers for electronic skins (E‐Skins) needed to achieve artificial intelligence. However, most of the reported electronic skin systems lack the capability to process and interpret the sensor data. Herein, a new design of artificial p...
Current minimally invasive surgical robots are lacking in force sensing that is robust to temperature and electromagnetic variation while being compatible with micro-sized instruments. This paper presents a multi-axis force sensing module that can be integrated with micro-sized surgical instruments such as biopsy forceps. The proposed miniature sen...
In recent years, advances in modern technology have altered the practice of surgery from open to minimally invasive surgery (MIS) aided by robots. Teleoperated surgical robotic systems (TSRSs) provide numerous significant benefits for MIS over traditional approaches, including improved safety, more efficient and precise surgery, better cosmesis, sh...
Endoscopic cameras attached to miniaturized snake-like continuum robotic arms can improve dexterity, accessibility, and visibility in minimally invasive surgical tasks. This steerable camera can expand the field of view and enhance the surgical experience with additional degrees of freedom. However, it also creates more control options that complic...
Many robotic surgical systems have been developed with microsized forceps for tissue manipulation. However, these systems often lack force sensing at the tool side and the manipulation forces are roughly estimated and controlled relying on the surgeon's visual perception. To address this challenge, we present a vision-based module to enable the mic...
Stiffness-adjustable snake-like robots have been proposed for various applications, including minimally invasive surgery. Based on a variable neutral-line mechanism, previous works proposed a class of snake-like robots that can adjust their stiffness by changing the driving cables’ tensions. A constant curvature hypothesis was used to formulate suc...
Keyhole surgery requires highly dexterous snake-like robotic arms capable of bending around anatomical obstacles to access clinical targets that diverge from the direct port-of-access. Design optimization for these robots under patient-specific anatomical constraints is still lacking, particularly concerning the critical metric of dexterity. In thi...
Misalignment between the camera frame and the operator frame is commonly seen in a teleoperated system and usually degrades the operation performance. The effects of such misalignment have not been fully investigated for
eye-in-hand
systems–systems that have the camera (
eye
) mounted to the end-effector (
hand
) to gain compactness in confined...
In minimally invasive surgery, miniaturisation and in situ adjustable stiffness of robotic manipulators are desired features. Previous research proposed a simple and effective tendon-driven curve-joint manipulator design using a variable neutral-line mechanism, which highly satisfies both criteria. A kinematic model was developed for such a manipul...
Telerobotic systems combined with miniaturised snake-like or elephant-trunk robotic arms can improve the ergonomics and accessibility in minimally invasive surgical tasks such as knee arthroscopy. Such systems, however, are usually designed in a specific and integral approach, making it expensive to adapt to various procedures or patient anatomies....
Misalignment between the camera frame and the operator frame is commonly seen in a teleoperated system and usually degrades the operation performance. The effects of such misalignment have not been fully investigated for eye-in-hand systems - systems that have the camera (eye) mounted to the end-effector (hand) to gain compactness in confined space...
Deep-learning-based segmentation methods have shown great success across many medical image applications. However, the custom training paradigms suffer from a well-known constraint of the requirement of pixel-wise annotations, which is labor-intensive, especially when they are required to learn new classes incrementally. Contemporary incremental le...
Robotic-assisted orthopaedic procedures demand accurate spatial joint measurements. Tracking of human joint motion is challenging in many applications, such as in sport motion analyses. In orthopaedic surgery, these challenges are even more prevalent, where small errors may cause iatrogenic damage in patients – highlighting the need for robust and...
As intraocular surgery progressed, the tools in use have shrunk in size, from 20- to 25-gauge and beyond. The reduction in light intensity caused by this has pushed light pipe advancement in the direction of brighter and brighter light sources. Despite these advances, the rigid nature of regular light pipes still limits the range of illumination, e...
Robotic-assisted orthopaedic surgeries demand accurate, automated leg manipulation for improved spatial accuracy to reduce iatrogenic damage. In this study, we propose novel rigid body designs and an optical tracking volume setup for tracking of the femur, tibia and surgical instruments. Anatomical points inside the leg are measured using Computed...
The distributed sense of touch forms an essential component that defines real-time perception and situational awareness in humans. Electronic skins are an emerging technology in conferring artificial sense of touch for smart human-machine interfaces. However, assigning conformably distributed sense of touch over a large area has been challenging to...
In the past decade, medical robotics has gained significant traction within the surgical field. While the introduction of fully autonomous robotic systems for surgical procedures still remains a challenge, robotic assisted interventions have become increasingly more interesting for the scientific and clinical community. This happens especially when...
Tendon-driven snake-like arms have been used to create highly dexterous continuum robots so that they can bend around anatomical obstacles to access clinical targets. In this paper, we propose a design algorithm for developing patient-specific surgical continuum manipulators optimized for oriental dexterity constrained by task-space obstacles. The...
Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance has the advantages in terms of increasing the force transmission ability and improving safety with monitored fo...
Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance has the advantages in terms of increasing the force transmission ability and improving safety with monitored fo...
While Product of Exponentials (POE) formula has been gaining increasing popularity in modeling the kinematics of a serial-link robot, the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) notation is still the most widely used due to its intuitive and concise geometric interpretation of the robot. This paper has developed an analytical solution to automatically convert a P...
Minimally invasive procedures have gained everincreasing popularity due to their advantages of smaller incisions, faster recoveries, fewer complications, and reduced scarring to name a few. With the force exertion and curvilinear flexibility at their distal end effectors, continuum tubular robots have the potential to perform robot-assisted trans-o...
Efficient and robust visual place recognition is of great importance to autonomous mobile robots. Recent work has shown that features learned from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve impressed performance with efficient feature size, where most of them are pooled or aggregated from a convolutional feature map. However, convolutional filter...
While the Product of Exponentials (POE) formula has been gaining increasing popularity in modeling the kinematics of a serial-link robot, the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) notation is still the most widely used due to its intuitive and concise geometric interpretation of the robot. This paper outlines the development of an analytical solution to automat...
In this paper, 7 revolutions with 6 degrees of freedom (7R 6-DOF) robots having non-spherical wrist are widely used in automatic coating of automobiles and aircrafts. These robots do not follow the Pieper rule; thus, a large amount of time is spent using numerical algorithms to calculate the inverse kinematic (IK) solutions. There- fore, this paper...
The Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) model and the product of exponentials (POE) model have been two popular methods for modeling the kinematics of a serial-link robot. While these two models are equivalent in essence, no study has revealed how to convert from the POE model to the D-H model. The conversion enables direct utilization of established algorith...
Continuum robots are increasingly used in minimally invasive surgeries. To date, the concentric tube mechanism and the cable-driven mechanism have been two prevalent mechanisms for constructing continuum robots. As these two mechanisms complement each other, it is worth exploring the possibility of combining them together. In this paper, we investi...
Purpose:
To determine the perceptions of surgeons at both consultant and resident level to the difficulties of performing knee arthroscopy and to determine their willingness to adopt robotic technology.
Methods:
A questionnaire was designed to discern the attitude of orthopaedic consultants and residents to the technical challenges of performing...
Conventional concentric tube robots (CTRs) have low dexterity at the tip, which does not fit the requirements of complicated operations in minimally invasive surgery. A 2mm diameter cable-driven micro end effector is designed and fabricated for CTRs to increase dexterity in confined spaces. The end-effector is made by a simple fabrication procedure...