Mingchuan Zhou

• Doctor of Engineering
• Technical University of Munich

Tasks in the meat processing sector are physically challenging, repetitive, and prone to worker scarcity. Therefore, the imperative adoption of mechanization and automation within the domain of meat processing is underscored by its key role in mitigating labor-intensive processes while concurrently enhancing productivity, safety, and operator wellb...

The microinjection of Zebrafish embryos is significant to life science and biomedical research. In this article, a novel automated system is developed for cell microinjection. A sophisticated microfluidic chip is designed to transport, hold, and inject cells continuously. For the first time, a microinjector with microforce perception is proposed an...

Fragile fruit uploading and packaging are labor-intensive and time-consuming steps in postharvest industry. With the aging of the global population, it is supposed to develop robotic grasping systems to replace manual labor. However, damage-less grasping of fragile fruit is the key problem in robotization. Inappropriate grasping force will result i...

Dexterity micromanipulation is a significant topic in the field of robotics. Herein, a novel robotic rotating microjoint controlled by an exogenous magnetic field based on magnetic programmable soft materials, which brings more dexterity to the micromanipulation task is proposed. First, the magnetic soft material is synthesized and the microjoint i...

Manipulating cells at a small scale is widely acknowledged as a complex and challenging task, especially when it comes to cell grasping and transportation. Various precise methods have been developed to remotely control the movement of microrobots. However, the manipulation of micro-objects necessitates the use of end-effectors. This paper presents...

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for biometric measurement and diagnosis of internal organs due to the advantages of being real-time and radiation-free. However, due to inter-operator variations, resulting images highly depend on the experience of sonographers. This work proposes an intelligent robotic sonographer to autonomously “explore” ta...

Given that common egg counting methods in conventional layer farms are inefficient and costly, there is a growing demand for cost-effective solutions with high counting accuracy, expandable functionality, and flexibility that can be easily shared between different coops. However, accurate real-time egg counting faces challenges due to small size, d...

Achieving efficient and robust grasping manipulation in microscopic scenarios is crucial for robotic applications. As a typical end-effector, the microgripper that can perform gripping-holding-releasing operations, plays an essential role in the area of micromanipulation. To facilitate the development of industrial microassembly and cell micromanip...

Obtaining single cell from tissues is important for intersection of information and bioscience research. In this article, a robotic framework based on micromanipulation system has been proposed, which can automatically and intelligently cut down single cells intact from tissue sections. The proposed method consists of several steps. An attention me...

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for biometric measurement and diagnosis of internal organs due to the advantages of being real-time and radiation-free. However, due to high inter-operator variability, resulting images highly depend on operators' experience. In this work, an intelligent robotic sonographer is proposed to autonomously "explore...

Abstract The mechanical properties of cells play an important role in cell development and function. Therefore, measurement of cell mechanical properties is a fundamental and essential tool for cell research. In this article, a novel method to estimate the force exerted on a living cell is proposed based on glass needle deformation, which does not...

Subretinal injection is a complicated task for retinal surgeons to operate manually. In this paper we demonstrate a robust framework for needle detection and localisation in robot‐assisted subretinal injection using microscope‐integrated Optical Coherence Tomography with deep learning. Five convolutional neural networks with different architectures...

Stereo matching is a depth perception method for plant phenotyping with high throughput. In recent years, the accuracy and real-time performance of the stereo matching models have been greatly improved. While the training process relies on specialized large-scale datasets, in this research, we aim to address the issue in building stereo matching da...

Retinal surgery is widely considered to be a complicated and challenging task even for specialists. Image-guided robot-assisted intervention is among the novel and promising solutions that may enhance human capabilities therein. In this paper, we demonstrate the possibility of using spotlights for 5D guidance of a microsurgical instrument. The theo...

The plant factory is a form of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) which is offers a promising solution to the problem of food security worldwide. Plant growth parameters need to be acquired for process control and yield estimation in plant factories. In this paper, we propose a fast and non-destructive framework for extracting growth paramete...

Robotic ultrasound (US) imaging has been seen as a promising solution to overcome the limitations of free-hand US examinations, i.e., inter-operator variability. \revision{However, the fact that robotic US systems cannot react to subject movements during scans limits their clinical acceptance.} Regarding human sonographers, they often react to pati...

Single‐cell manipulation technology is an essential method of cell research, with wide applications in biological engineering, medical engineering, agricultural engineering, and other precise manipulation fields. Cell pose adjustment and cell puncture are considered as two basic operations of single‐cell manipulation. Cell pose adjustment can be us...

Supervised learning depth estimation methods can achieve good performance when trained on high-quality ground-truth, like LiDAR data. However, LiDAR can only generate sparse 3D maps which causes losing information. Obtaining high-quality ground-truth depth data per pixel is difficult to acquire. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a no...

Famous tea industry which need to harvest tea buds has great economic benefits. However, the harvesting is time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially with the shortage of labor currently, an intelligent tea bud picking robot is urgently needed. The vision system is a precursor to the development of a tea bud picking robot. To resolve such issue...

With the advance in algorithms, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) offers solutions to trajectory planning under uncertain environments. Different from traditional trajectory planning which requires lots of effort to tackle complicated high-dimensional problems, the recently proposed DRL enables the robot manipulator to autonomously learn and discov...

Supervised learning depth estimation methods can achieve good performance when trained on high-quality ground-truth, like LiDAR data. However, LiDAR can only generate sparse 3D maps which causes losing information. Obtaining high-quality ground-truth depth data per pixel is difficult to acquire. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a no...

Robotic ultrasound (US) imaging has been seen as a promising solution to overcome the limitations of free-hand US examinations, i.e., inter-operator variability. However, the fact that robotic US systems cannot react to subject movements during scans limits their clinical acceptance. Regarding human sonographers, they often react to patient movemen...

Stereo matching is an important task in computer vision which has drawn tremendous research attention for decades. While in terms of disparity accuracy, density and data size, public stereo datasets are difficult to meet the requirements of models. In this paper, we aim to address the issue between datasets and models and propose a large scale ster...

Pruning is a time-consuming and labor-intensive practice for managing of dormant jujube orchards, in which dormant pruning is still mainly dependent on manual operation. Automated pruning using a robotic platform could be a better solution to overcome the skilled labor shortage and increased labor costs. With the development of dwarf and dense plan...

This paper propose a novel dictionary learning approach to detect event action using skeletal information extracted from RGBD video. The event action is represented as several latent atoms and composed of latent spatial and temporal attributes. We perform the method at the example of fall event detection. The skeleton frames are clustered by an ini...

Retinal surgery is known to be a complicated and challenging task for an ophthalmologist even for retina specialists. Image guided robot-assisted intervention is among the novel and promising solutions that may enhance human capabilities during microsurgery. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel method for 3D guidance of a microsurgical instrument...

Tissue deformation in ultrasound (US) imaging leads to geometrical errors when measuring tissues due to the pressure exerted by probes. Such deformation has an even larger effect on 3D US volumes as the correct compounding is limited by the inconsistent location and geometry. This work proposes a patient-specified stiffness-based method to correct...

Tissue deformation in ultrasound (US) imaging leads to geometrical errors when measuring tissues due to the pressure exerted by probes. Such deformation has an even larger effect on 3D US volumes as the correct compounding is limited by the inconsistent location and geometry. This work proposes a patient-specified stiffness-based method to correct...

Ultrasound imaging is widely employed for diagnosis and staging of peripheral vascular diseases, mainly due to its high availability and the fact it doesnot emit radiation. However, high inter-operator variability and a lack of repeatability of US image acquisition hinder the implementation of extensive screening programs. To address this challenge...

Robotic three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound (US) imaging has been employed to overcome the drawbacks of traditional US examinations, such as high inter-operator variability and lack of repeatability. However, object movement remains a challenge as unexpected motion decreases the quality of the 3D compounding. Furthermore, attempted adjustment of obje...

The target-oriented spraying is an effective way to minimize chemical input in agricultural production and it is important to actualizing sustainable agriculture. This article focused on the design and optimization of the target spray platform. The spray platform consists of three parts: the vision system, the spray system, and the moving platform....

Retinal surgery is a complex activity that can be challenging for a surgeon to perform effectively and safely. Image guided robot-assisted surgery is one of the promising solutions that bring significant surgical enhancement in treatment outcome and reduce the physical limitations of human surgeons. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel method for...

Retinal surgery is a complex activity that can be challenging for a surgeon to perform effectively and safely. Image guided robot-assisted surgery is one of the promising solutions that bring significant surgical enhancement in treatment outcome and reduce the physical limitations of human surgeons. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel method for...

Retinal vein cannulation (RVC) is a potential treatment for retinal vein occlusion (RVO). Manual surgery has limitations in RVC due to extremely small vessels and instruments involved, as well as the presence of physiological hand tremor. Robot-assisted retinal surgery may be a better approach to smooth and accurate instrument manipulation during t...

The correct orientation of an ultrasound (US) probe is one of the main parameters governing the US image quality. With the rise of robotic ultrasound systems (RUSS), methods that can automatically compute the orientation promise repeatable, automatic acquisition from predefined angles resulting in high-quality US imaging. In this paper, we propose...

In robotic radiosurgery, motion tracking is crucial for accurate treatment planning of tumor inside the thoracic or abdominal cavity. Currently, motion characterization for respiration tracking mainly focuses on markers that are placed on the surface of human chest. Nevertheless, limited markers are not capable of expressing the comprehensive motio...

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely employed for diagnosis and staging of peripheral vascular diseases (PVD), mainly due to its high availability and the fact it does not emit radiation. However, high inter-operator variability and a lack of repeatability of US image acquisition hinder the implementation of extensive screening programs. To address th...

Acquiring good image quality is one of the main challenges for fully-automatic robot-assisted ultrasound systems (RUSS). The presented method aims at overcoming this challenge for orthopaedic applications by optimizing the orientation of the robotic ultrasound (US) probe, i.e. aligning the central axis of the US probe to the tissue's surface normal...

This paper introduces an optimized input device workflow to control an eye surgical robot in a simulated vitreoretinal environment. The input device is a joystick with four Degrees of Freedom (DOF) that controls a six DOFs robot. This aim is achieved through a segmentation plan for an eye surgeon. In this study, the different surgical phases are de...

With the increasing power densities, managing the on-chip temperature has become an important design challenge, especially for hard real-time systems. This paper addresses the problem of minimizing the peak temperature under hard real-time constraints using a combination of dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic power management. We derive a closed-fo...

Vitreoretinal (VR) surgery is typical microsurgery with delicate and complex surgical procedures. The vision-based navigation for robot-assisted VR surgery has not been fully exploited because of the challenges that arise from illumination, high precision, and safety assessments. This paper presents a novel method to estimate the 6DOF needle pose s...

Ophthalmic microsurgery is known to be a challenging operation, which requires very precise and dexterous manipulation. Image guided robot-assisted surgery (RAS) is a promising solution that brings significant improvements in outcomes and reduces the physical limitations of human surgeons. However, this technology must be further developed before i...

Ophthalmic microsurgery is known to be a challenging operation, which requires very precise and dexterous manipulation. Image guided robot-assisted surgery (RAS) is a promising solution that brings significant improvements in outcomes and reduces the physical limitations of human surgeons. However, this technology must be further developed before i...

This paper investigated the possibility of discriminating tomato yellow leaf curl disease by a hyperspectral imaging technique. A hyperspecral imaging system collected hyperspectral images of both healthy and infected tomato leaves. The reflectance spectra, first derivative reflectance spectra and absolute reflectance difference spectra in the wave...

Needle segmentation is a fundamental step for needle reconstruction and image-guided surgery. Although there has been success stories in needle segmentation for non-microsurgeries, the methods cannot be directly extended to ophthalmic surgery due to the challenges bounded to required spatial resolution. As the ophthalmic surgery is performed by fin...

A computer vision system was developed to automate the melanotic cooked shrimp detection in production line. An image acquisition device was built to obtain images of each shrimp sample. The images were pre-processed by using median filtering method and segmented with quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) method. Extracted features, including melan...

Removing impurities in post-harvest raw shrimp is critical to improve shrimp quality. The traditional processes of removing impurities were often accomplished via manual work, which is inefficient and inaccurate. A novel method based on iteration algorithm was proposed to eliminate impurities automatically. Iteration algorithm was performed by comb...

The important task of replugging bad or missing cells with healthy seedlings in greenhouses is carried out by automatic transplanters. Grippers of such transplanters spend a considerable amount of time shuttling between the source and target trays during replugging. Therefore, work efficiency of transplanters can be significantly improved by tour p...

A platform was built up to collect the pressure data near the nozzle. The instantaneous flow data was calculated based on the relationship between pressure and flow by using Kalman filtering algorithm, and the average spray flow rate was obtained by integrating over the instantaneous flow, then an automatic piecewise linear fitting method was desig...

Healthy seedlings need to be transplanted into vacancy cells in tray instead of unhealthy ones. It is an important step of seedling tray cultivation in the facility agriculture. The end-effector leaved the origin, and grasped the health seedlings one by one from the transplanting tray to the aim tray. And then it was back to the origin until the al...