Announcing the ROS Medical community group

General
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Are you using ROS in a medical context?

You’re not alone! There was a great turnout at the medical birds of a feather at ROSCon last year- let’s not wait so long to get together again.

The ROS medical community group will be meeting May 15th. We’ll be triaging the discussions, presentations and collaborations that will be most valuable to the community moving forward. Sign up to this mailing list to receive the calendar invite.

In the meantime, let’s get some intros going.

To the extent that you can share,

  • who are you? (As an individual or organisation)

  • what are you working on?

  • what platform do you use?

  • what are your plans/goals with ROS?

  • what libraries are you implementing that could be useful to others?

  • what experience do you have that could be useful to the community?

I’ll go first:

Who are you? (As an individual or organisation)
I’m Deanna Hood, robotics engineer and former ROS 2 core developer. I’ve worked on lots of different robotics applications in the 10y since my MSc, which is partly how I ended up Australian Young Engineer of the Year (go robots!). In the scope of medical, I used to lead robotics for an early stage surgical robot for regenerative wound treatment (aka skin-printing robot), and now am relieved to be in diagnostics :sweat_smile:

What are you working on?
I’m currently helping Vexev make the first robotic tomographic ultrasound for artery scanning, which is needed for dialysis treatment/ cardiovascular disease prevention :muscle:

What platform do you use?
I worked with KUKA LBR Med for a few years for the skin-printing robot and now use the custom arm/manipulator developed at Vexev.

What are your plans/goals with ROS?
Ambitious :nerd_face:

What libraries are you implementing that could be useful to others?
Interface package for standardised ultrasound messages, eg BMode, Doppler, IQ, RF data. Robotics safety architecture for mitigating risk of SOUP.

What experience do you have that could be useful to the community?
For a while I was the resident Australian expert on the LBR Med! And from my years on the ROS 2 core team I know my way around the ros2 code base and DDS integration better than the average robotics engineer (:smiling_face:).

How about you?!

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Look who’s back! So glad to see you again.

Don’t forget to send in your meeting info so we can get it added to the community events calendar!

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hahah thanks, it’s great to BE “back” :grin: Admittedly I don’t hang out on Discourse much, and fear the same for other roboticists who’d benefit from the community - so please dob in your med friends, anyone who’s reading this! We’ve already got a number of sign ups off this thread, but plenty more to reach

I’m gonna nominate @tom-at-work and @shashank for the intro thread, who have led the community initiatives incl BOF up to this point :bowing_woman: Thanks for bringing us together :handshake:

And for those in-person at Robotics Summit in Boston this week, I would def check out @tom-at-work 's med+OSS themed talk, ESPECIALLY for the conversations it’s likely to spark in the hallway, afterwards (Tom, would you like to introduce yourself here?)

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Thank you, @dhood, for starting this thread and setting up the ROS Medical community group.

  • who are you? (As an individual or organisation)
    I’m Tom Amlicke, solutions architect at MedAcuity. I’ve been working with ROS since Groovy. I was introduced to ROS while integrating it with MATLAB and Simulink. I’ve worked on robots running ROS in military applications and warehouse operations. I have also spent many years working with custom-built medical and surgical robotic systems. Unfortunately, these systems have not used ROS, at least not in the main control loop.

  • what are you working on?
    I work for MedAcuity, a medical device software company, where I am the technical director of MedAcuity’s robotics practice. I’m working on multiple robot-assisted surgical (RAS) systems. These systems are built on QNX or other real-time OS and use DDS to communicate between processor nodes. I’m also currently working on non-medical ROS 2 systems that work in a warehouse environment.

  • what platform do you use?
    Some interesting platforms I use other than ROS 2 include Nvidia, Kuka, Zynq, RTI, QNX, MathWorks

  • what are your plans/goals with ROS?
    Initiatives such as SpaceROS and Autoware address safety-critical applications in those domains. I’m interested in what ROS 2 can do to address 62304 and other relevant medical standards.

  • what experience do you have that could be useful to the community?
    I have years of experience working with medical devices and robot-assisted surgical robotics. I know the standards and best practices for developing medical robotics that are cleared for use by the FDA, MDR, and other regulatory groups. I’m familiar with traditional software development and model-based design with code generation.

I will be in Boston from today through Thursday at the Robotics Summit. My talk is on Thursday. Please let me know if you are attending. I look forward to meeting you and hope this event grows our community.

Best Regards,
Tom Amlicke

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Hi All, eager to learn more about the domain.

Who are you? (As an individual or organisation)
I’m Martin, soon to be PhD :crossed_fingers: working on medical robotics. Previously been with Johnson & Johnson on the Monarch system.

What are you working on?
Automating surgical tasks, computer vision, and control.

What platform do you use?
In terms of robots, using the KUKA LBR Med7 in collaboration with KUKA, occasionally the xArm.

In terms of cameras, started using the ZED 2i more frequently now, but also Storz laparoscopes.

What are your plans/goals with ROS?
TBD

What libraries are you implementing that could be useful to others?
Been now working some time on the LBR-Stack, but also other projects, some of which are closed source atm.

What experience do you have that could be useful to the community?
Gained some experience doing marker-free eye-to-hand registrations, which might be beneficial to industrial robots at first, but also the medical domain moving forward. Will be open-sourced soon-ish.

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Hi Everyone

First of all great initiatve Deanna, I am happy to share some information here

who are you? (As an individual or organisation)
I am Shashank Sharma, Associate Director, heading robotics software at KARLSTORZ VentureONE in Germany. I had organized the BOF meeting for Medical ROS at ROSCON 23 ROS4Med BOF. It was a great event with many participants specially organizations ranging from J&J Medtech, Asensus, Intrinsic, KUKA, PickNik, RTI and many more, showing interest.

  • what are you working on?
    I am envisioning democratizing medical robotics development through software leveraging on open source.

  • what platform do you use?
    From software side quiet felxible, ideally focusing on POSIX compliance.

  • what are your plans/goals with ROS?
    Make it reliable, low latency, safe for use in Medical as well as ease of use, tooling and standardization

  • what libraries are you implementing that could be useful to others?
    Motion planning, benchmarking tools, QMS, Drive technology (like EtherCAT), SOUP, DDS etc

  • what experience do you have that could be useful to the community?
    I bring 15+ years of Industrial experience in robotics software development, architectures and algorithm development (at KUKA) and medical related SW development processes.

Looking forward to the meeting on 15th May.

Best Wishes
Shashank Sharma

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Great to get the context from these intros, thanks for sharing @tom-at-work @mhubii @shashank ! Some very interesting products and projects around, just as I suspected :nerd_face: Didn’t realise you were at KUKA before, @shashank, and didn’t realise there’s a ROS2 FRI wrapper, @mhubii :muscle:

Looking forward to meeting you to hear more.

Those who’ve already joined the mailing list should see the calendar invite now, but I’ll make sure late-joiners get it, also. Mark your calendars, we’ll meet on 2024-05-15T13:00:00Z :calendar:

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Hi all,

Thanks for starting this Deanna, and good to hear from you again.

  • who are you?

I’m Nate Koenig and I’m working at Laza Medical.

  • what are you working on?

I’m working on imaging solutions for cardiovascular interventions.

  • what platform do you use?

Currently on Humble with plans to move to Jazzy. Ubuntu for the OS, and Gazebo for simulation.

  • what are your plans/goals with ROS?

Well, my goal with ROS is to make a functioning system as fast as possible. I have plans to upstream improvements, initially to sw_watchdogs and ethercat drivers.

More broadly speaking, it’d be great to improve the certification process of a ROS-based system.

  • what libraries are you implementing that could be useful to others?

Initially building off of existing ROS packages. I’ll have to see if we create something unique that is meaningful to the community at large.

  • what experience do you have that could be useful to the community?

I’ve dabbled in open source software over the years.

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Hope you all can join us tomorrow. Here’s the calendar link: https://calendar.app.google/VoLgkt8wqovWAr1V9

Make sure to join here to receive future event news: this mailing list

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Next Medical Community group meeting announced!

After a great discussion at our first meeting, the next is scheduled for 2024-07-02T16:00:00Z.

See this post.

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Hi All,

Sorry I could not attend the early meetings, Hope its not too late to join,

  • who are you?

I am Manura De Silva, I am a Graduate Research Scholar at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

  • what are you working on?

I am currently pursuing a Masters by Research, in this project I am focusing on developing a robotic ankle exoskeleton device for therapeutic exercises, (Its into the Rehabilitation Robotics)

  • what platform do you use?

Currently, I am not using any ROS distros, yet willing to do so

  • what are your plans/goals with ROS?

I want to implement and use a ROS based system for this Rehabilitation Robotics approach, which I think will be more accessible.

  • what libraries are you implementing that could be useful to others?

Currently I am not referring to any specific libraries

  • what experience do you have that could be useful to the community?

Except from the ROS based system development, in which I’m a beginner, I have some experiences working with teams who have developed several surgical robotic devices, exoskeletons and prostheses, and in device design aspects,

Looking forward to learn from you and always happy to help in any way possible

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Hi all,

Will anyone be attending the Society of Robotic Surgery’s annual meeting next week? I’ll be there and hope to meet others interested in the ROS medical community.

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