Steffen Peikert

I am a doctoral candidate at SPARC with focus on continuum robotics and path planning through high risk tissue.

In 2017 and 2021, I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree at the KIT, subsequently. During my time as a student I worked as a research assistant at the HERA-Lab @KIT, which I then joined as a doctoral candidate. As part of my research, I developed a simulation model for elastic soft tissue tearing and provided a method for registering non-rigid liver tissue onto a pre-existing, default model.

For my PhD topic, I am investigating robotic instrument navigation in high risk tissue (eg, for brain tumor removal or automated eye surgery). This includes building specialized robotic hardware like concentric tube robots and the corresponding non-linear robot kinematics, soft tissue simulation and multi-objective path planning.

Research interests:

• Flexible robots and instruments
• Optimal trajectory planning
• Elastic soft tissue simulation
• Medical data processing and augmentation

Publications:

• R. Peter and S. Peikert et al., “Lens Capsule Tearing in Cataract Surgery using Reinforcement Learning”, 2024 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) [accepted]
• S. Peikert et al., “Automated Linear and Non-Linear Path Planning for Neurosurgical Interventions”, 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), doi: 10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811679.