Abstract
Biomedical Robotics poses new and exciting problems for theory and technology to Robotics and to many other disciplines. Biomedical Robots are expected to be very important for better quality of health care and life for citizens, and they have strong potential for the development of a new and solid industry.
Biomedical Robotics includes the “medical” applications of robotics and mechatronics, such as in surgery, endoscopy, rehabilitation, assistance to the disabled and the elderly, and prosthetics, as well as research and application in more speculative areas, such as the modeling and replication if biological systems.
In this talk, an overview of the field is presented, comprising definitions of Biomedical Robotics and examples of applications to surgery, endoscopy, rehabilitation and bionics. State of the art, scientific and technical problems and perspectives in these areas are discussed.
Biography
Paolo Dario received his Dr. Eng. Degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1977. He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. He also established and teaches the course on Mechatronics at the School of Engineering of the University of Pisa. He has been Visiting Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, and at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. He was the founder of the ARTS (Advanced Robotics Technologies and Systems) Laboratory and is currently the Coordinator of the CRIM (Center for Research in Microengineering) Laboratory of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, where he supervises a team of about 70 researchers and Ph.D. students. He is also the Director of the Polo Sant’Anna Valdera and a Vice-Director of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.
His main research interests are in the fields of medical robotics, mechatronics and microengineering, and specifically in sensors and actuators for the above applications. He is the coordinator of many national and European projects, the editor of two books on the subject of robotics, and the author of more than 200 scientific papers. He is the editor of many international journals.
Professor Dario serves as President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, as Co-Chairman of the Technical Committee on Medical Robotics of the same Society, is an IEEE Fellow and a recipient of the Joseph Engelberger Award. He is also a member of the Board of the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR).
