Keynote speakers

J-P. Merlet is a senior scientist at INRIA, the French National Research Institute in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.

He received his Engineer title from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes in 1980, his PhD in 1986 from Paris VI University and his Research habilitation from Nice University in 1993.

 He has worked as an engineer in the food industry (Lu) and in civil engineering. He has worked as research engineer at the CEA (French nuclear Agency) and as research associate in Japan (Kyoto University, MEL, Tsukuba) and in Canada (McGill University, Montreal). He his now team leader of the HEPHAISTOS project of INRIA.

 J-P. Merlet is the author of over 250 conference papers and over 50 journal papers in the field of force control of robots, algebraic geometry, mechanism history, constraints solving and parallel robots.

He has published a reference book on this later subject with 2 editions in French and two editions in English. 

J-P. Merlet was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transaction on Robotics and Automation, and Mechanism and Machine Theory, chairman of the IFToMM (International Federation on the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms) Technical Committee on Computational Kinematics and of the French Section of IFToMM. He is currently member of IFToMM Executive council.  He is an IEEE Fellow and received the IFToMM Award of Merits and is doctor honoris causae from Innsbruck University.

The field of parallel robots has always been a large provider of very interesting and complex problems involving computational kinematics as, for example efficient forward kinematics or workspace calculation. If we consider now that the rigid legs are substituted by coilable cable, that can only pull but cannot push it may be thought that this minor difference will not drastically change the analysis so that computational kinematics algorithms developed for parallel robot with rigid legs may still be applied. We will show on various examples that this assumption is basically wrong and that the analysis and most of the algorithms need to be revisited, thereby opening a new field for research.

Professor Doina PISLA, is currently the Director of Council for University Doctoral Studies within the University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania and the Director of the Research Center for Industrial Robots Simulation and Testing - CESTER within the same university.

Professor Doina PISLA, obtained her PhD within the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in 1997.

Following an academic carrier she became full professor at the Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering in 2005, teaching lectures in Modelling and Simulation of Robots and Medical Robotics.

Prof. Pisla’s research activity is focused mainly on the field of Robotics and Mechatronics, with emphasis on the Kinematics and Dynamics of parallel robots, Development of Innovative robotic structures for medicine,  Reconfigurable structures and simulators. As a result of her scientific activity, prof. Pisla published over 150 peer-reviewed full papers in scientific journals and conferences, co-authored 10 patents being currently Topic Editor of the Mechanical Science, Copernicus Publication.

In the meanwhile she served in boards and program committees of various international conferences, and is currently the Chair of the Technical Committee for Computational Kinematics of IFToMM (International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science).

An overview of the considered most important trends in medical robotics and the way to adapt new technologies to robotic surgery are presented.

In parallel with the continuous evolution and discovery of new minimally invasive surgical procedures (MIS), the technology evolution enabled the introduction of more robotic systems in the operating rooms, preserving the old concept “Primum non nocere” (“First, do no harm”).

Innovative approaches in Surgical Robotics are presented, highlighting the milestones in their evolution. Starting with some important concepts, a classification of the surgical robots is made. The latest achievements in surgical robotics worldwide and in Romania are presented, followed by the main current challenges, some ethical issues and the vision regarding the future of the surgical robots.

The already achieved robotics systems for surgery have shown a continuous evolution of this challenging and difficult research field.