Mahdi Tavakoli Afshari

Area of Study / Keywords

Robotic Systems Medical Robotics Surgical Robotics Rehabilitation Robotics Assistive Robotics Collaborative Robotics Wearable Robotics Augmented Reality Technologies Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Telerobotics Telemedicine/Telehealth for COVID-19 Biomedical Engineering Control Systems

About

Mahdi Tavakoli is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from Ferdowsi University and K.N. Toosi University, Iran, in 1996 and 1999, respectively. He received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, in 2005. In 2006, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics (CSTAR), Canada. In 2007-2008, he was an NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University, USA. Dr. Tavakoli’s research interests broadly involve the areas of robotics and systems control. Specifically, his research focuses on haptics and teleoperation control, medical robotics, and image-guided surgery. Dr. Tavakoli is the lead author of Haptics for Teleoperated Surgical Robotic Systems (World Scientific, 2008). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Editor for IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Journal of Medical Robotics Research, IET Control Theory and Applications, and Mechatronics.

Research

Research Interests

• Robotics and Telerobotics
• Haptics
• Teleoperation Control
• Surgical and Therapeutic Robotics
• Image-Guided Surgery

Current Research

• Bilateral haptic teleoperation control of systems with practical non-idealities including communication delay, control sampling, model uncertainty, robot flexibility, joint backlash and friction, etc.
• Analysis and design of multilateral haptic tele-cooperation systems
• Studying the human task performance in teleoperation and tele-cooperation under degraded haptic feedback (e.g., due to time delay)
• Robot-assisted, image-guided surgery on the beating heart
• Needle steering planning in robot-assisted prostate brachytherapy
• In-home rehabilitation of stroke patients using haptic telepresence technology

ECE 464 - Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Intervention

Basic concepts of computer-integrated intervention. Surgical CAD/CAM, assist and simulation systems. Actuators and imagers. Medical robot design, control and optimization. Surgeon-robot interface technology. Haptic feedback in surgical simulation and teleoperation. Virtual fixtures. Time delay compensation in telesurgery. Cooperative manipulation control. Overview of existing systems for robot-assisted intervention and for virtual-reality surgical simulation. Prerequisite: ECE 360 or ECE 462 or E E 357 or E E 462 or consent of the Department. Credit may be obtained in only one of ECE 464 or E E 464.

Browse more courses taught by Mahdi Tavakoli Afshari