Plenary Speeches

Plenary Speech II

AI-Powered Surgical Robots

Yun-hui Liu
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics

The rapid development of AI, in particular embodied AI, presents a lot of opportunity for robotics research and applications. In this talk, we will introduce our on-going research efforts on AI-powered robots that aim to automate the surgical procedures. The topics to be covered include AI-powered perception of surgical fields, LLM/VLM-driven surgical planning and control, surgical skill learning, system integration, and clinical experiments. In particular, we will introduce an AI-powered flexible surgical robot with level-3 autonomy for kidney stone treatment procedures and present its clinical experiments.

Biosketch

Yun-hui Liu received B. Eng. degree in Applied Dynamics from Beijing Institute of Technology, M. Eng. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Osaka University, and Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Tokyo. After working at the national Electrotechnical Laboratory of Japan as a Research Scientist, he joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and is currently a Choh-Ming Li Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, the Director of the CUHK T Stone Robotics Institute, and the Director/CEO of Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics funded by the InnoHK clusters of the HKSAR government. He has published more than 500 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and was listed in the Highly Cited Authors (Engineering) by Thomson Reuters. His research interests include vision-based robotics, machine intelligence and their applications in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and constructions. Prof. Liu has received numerous research awards from international journals and international conferences in robotics and automation, and from government agencies. In recent years, he has been actively transferring robotics technologies developed at university labs to industries, and co-founded VisionNav Robotics, CornerStone Robotics, etc. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Robotics and Biomimetics and served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. He is Fellow of IEEE, HKIE and HKAE.