Their ideas on AI in medical technology earned them and their team a place among the finalists in the NR Challenge: Prof. Dr. Massimo Kubon (left) and Clemens Sailer.
Neura Robotics Challenge: Fingers crossed for “HOP!”
Furtwangen University is one of the 15 international finalists in the Neura Robotics Challenge, which has been running since March. In the current round, the HFU's interdisciplinary project now has the chance to be among the top five entries. These teams would be eligible to participate in the final presentation at Neura Robotics (NR) and win a total of €150,000 in prize money. The result will be announced shortly.
Neura Robotics provided a cognitive “cobot” (collaborative robot) MAIRA free of charge for one year for research purposes for the challenge. Furtwangen University presented the HOP! project as part of the competition, which focuses on the use case of carpal tunnel surgery. In this hand surgery, the cobot is to be integrated into the working environment in an assisting role without the need to restructure the operating room infrastructure – MAIRA is to be integrated into the surgical team. The project team is demonstrating this using a recently completed cobotics project on carpal tunnel syndrome intervention with its own AI. The AI solution developed specifically expands the capabilities of the Neura Robotics robot and enables semi-autonomous assistance in the surgical environment.
Clemens Sailer, a graduate of Furtwangen University and research assistant, was responsible for the technology side of the project. The cross-faculty project was supervised by Prof. Dr. Massimo Kubon and Prof. Dr. Michael Engler. Prof. Dr. Jörg Friedrich was also involved in providing technical support.
During the virtual demo, Neura Robotics showed particular interest in the medical application and the potential integration of the solution into existing robotic systems. Neura Robotics is one of the first German manufacturers of humanoid robots. Beyond the competition, the project team hopes to see further collaborations in the field of humanoid robots in the operating room (which is also what the project name HOP stands for!).