Mahdi Tavakoli

Biography

Mahdi Tavakoli received his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from Ferdowsi University and K.N. Toosi University, Iran, in 1996 and 1999, respectively. He then received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, in 2005. In 2006, he was a post-doctoral research associate at Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics (CSTAR), London, ON, Canada. In 2007-2008, and prior to joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, Dr. Tavakoli was an NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellow with the BioRobotics Laboratory of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 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 first author of the book “Haptics for Teleoperated Surgical Robotic Systems” (World Scientific, 2008). He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is the Faculty Advisor for student clubs and projects.

Research Interest

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.