Kuntz Lab

6/26/24 – Our group has two papers being presented at this year’s Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics! “In Vivo Demonstration of a Bevel Tip Steerable Needle with an Integrated Fluid Channel” and “A Continuum Lung Stapler Leveraging Phase Changing Metal for Dexterity and Stiffness”

6/5/24 – Our paper, “Reward Learning from Suboptimal Demonstrations with Applications in Surgical Electrocautery“, Zohre Karimi*, Shing-Hei Ho*, Bao Thach, Alan Kuntz, and Daniel S. Brown, (*equal contribution), is honored as a finalist for best student paper and finalist for best paper at the 2024 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR)!

6/3/24 – We are at ISMR 2024 presenting two papers: “Modeling Kinematic Uncertainty of Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots via Mixture Density Networks” and “Reward Learning from Suboptimal Demonstrations with Applications in Surgical Electrocautery“.

5/13/24 – The Kuntz Lab is at IEEE ICRA 2024, presenting two papers: “DefGoalNet: Contextual Goal Learning from Demonstrations For Deformable Object Manipulation” and “Efficient and Accurate Mapping of Subsurface Anatomy via Online Trajectory Optimization for Robot Assisted Surgery“.

4/14/24 – We are presenting two papers at IEEE Robosoft 2024: “Directional Stiffness Switching via Phase Changing Metallic Spines” and “Combining Thermoelectrics and Low Melting Point Alloys to Create Reconfigurable Rigid-Compliant Manipulators“.

4/9/24 – Our paper, “The Impact of Design Factors on User Behavior in a Virtual Hospital Room to Explore Fall Prevention Strategies” has been published in HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal.

12/6/23 – Britton Jordan and Ronnie Koe have both been selected for the University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for the Spring 2023 semester!

10/29/23 – Our recent Science Robotics paper, “Autonomous medical needle steering in vivo” has been written about in multiple international media outlets, including Forbes!

9/20/23 – Our paper, “Autonomous medical needle steering in vivo” has been published in Science Robotics.

8/2/23 – Tanner Watts and Britton Jordan have both been selected for the University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for the Fall 2023 semester!

6/1/23 – Our paper, “Toward Continuum Robot Tentacles for Lung Interventions: Exploring Folding Support Disks” has been published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

4/10/23 – Our paper, “Screw-tip Soft Magnetically Steerable Needles” has been published in the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics (TMRB) journal.

1/31/23 – Our paper, “A Radial Folding Mechanism to Enable Surgical Continuum Manipulators to Fit Through Smaller Ports” has been accepted to the International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR) 2023!

12/22/22 – Our IEEE Access paper has been awarded the 2022 IEEE Access Best Video Award Part 1! This award is given to the best video of papers submitted in a 6-month period to the multidisciplinary open access journal.

12/14/22 – Michael Bentley has graduated from the group with a PhD in Computing, congratulations Dr. Bentley!

12/7/22 – Ryan Lam and Shing Hei Ho have both been selected for the University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for the Spring 2023 semester!

8/7/22 – Michael Bentley’s IEEE Access paper is now published: “Interactive-Rate Supervisory Control for Arbitrarily-Routed Multi-Tendon Robots via Motion Planning,” Michael Bentley, Caleb Rucker, and Alan Kuntz.

8/3/22 – Alexandra Leavitt and Ryan Lam have both been selected for the University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for the fall semester!

4/18/22 – We will have two papers appearing at the 2022 Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics: “Toward Targeted Therapy in the Brain by Leveraging Screw-Tip Soft Magnetically Steerable Needles,” Trevor J. Schwehr, Adam J. Sperry, John D. Rolston, Matthew D. Alexander, Jake J. Abbott, and Alan Kuntz; as well as “Optimizing Continuum Robot Tendon Routing for Minimally Invasive Brain Surgery,” Margaret Rox, Aidan Copinga, Robert P. Naftel, Robert J. Webster III, and Alan Kuntz.

4/13/22 – Alexandra Leavitt selected for the University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for the summer semester!

1/31/22 – Our paper “Learning Visual Shape Control of Novel 3D Deformable Objects from Partial-View Point Clouds,” Bao Thach, Brian Y. Cho, Alan Kuntz, and Tucker Hermans has been accepted to ICRA 2022. (arXiv)

11/19/21 – Yixuan Huang and Michael Bentley’s paper “Toward Learning Context-Dependent Tasks from Demonstration for Tendon-Driven Surgical Robots” is honored as a finalist for best paper and a finalist for best student paper at ISMR 2021!

11/18/21 – Brian Cho’s paper “Planning Sensing Sequences for Subsurface 3D Tumor Mapping” and Yixuan Huang and Michael Bentley’s paper “Toward Learning Context-Dependent Tasks from Demonstration for Tendon-Driven Surgical Robots” have been published and presented at the 2021 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR).

7/15/21 – Bao Thach’s paper “DeformerNet: A Deep Learning Approach to 3D Deformable Object Manipulation” has received an Honorable Mention – Best Paper recognition at the RSS Workshop on Deformable Object Simulation in Robotics (DO-Sim)!

4/14/21 – Aidan Copinga selected for the University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for the summer semester!

1/4/21 – Sarvenaz Chaeibakhsh’s paper “Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls” has been accepted to appear in the International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems 2021 (ICORES).

8/6/20 – Michael Bentley awarded a 2020 DDS&T Excellence in Publication Award in the Student Category for the work he did at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory!

7/31/20 – Laura Brannan selected for the University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for the fall semester!