Explore algorithmic motion planning for minimally-invasive robotic surgery in this comprehensive lecture from the Robotics Research Colloquium. Delve into the potential of steerable needles and concentric-tube robots to revolutionize common medical procedures, reducing patient recovery time and scarring. Examine the challenges of manual control and the need for automatic planning methods with provable guarantees. Learn about efficient planning capabilities for medical robots, combining techniques from computational geometry, graph theory, and machine learning. Discover how to measure distances between paths, follow reference paths, optimize designs, and minimize shearing in robotic surgeries. Investigate planning for steerable needles and site inspection for CRISP robots, including graph inspection planning challenges and implementation details. Gain insights from Oren Salzman, Assistant Professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, as he shares his research on addressing computational challenges in robot motion planning. Read more