The School of Engineering, Institute of Microengineering IMT, Lab of Robotic Systems (LSRO EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne) is among the top-ranked non-Anglo-Saxon universities. It has important activities in all fields of robotics, covering biomedical and industrial applications as well as humanoid and life inspired robotics with a total of about eight labs and over 100 scientific staff active in those fields. It is participating several highly competitive projects funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program and by NCCR (National Center of Competence in Research) of the Swiss National Foundation for Science (SNSF). The EPFL Robotics Lab LSRO has pioneered biomedical robotics with the MINERVA project for neurosurgery in the 1990ies. Recent activities have concentrated on surgery simulation for various mini-invasive interventions, especially the hardware part (force feedback) of such devices and on MRI compatible devices. Several spin-off companies in the biomedical field have resulted from such activities: xitact SA in Morges, Attracsys, Force Dimension etc. EPFL also boosts a newly established and highly visible School of Life Science, thus providing an ideal environment for biomedical research projects, together with the large activity in micro technologies (about 300 scientific staff) of the Engineering School.

role in the project: EPFL will lead the development of the surgeon workstation in order to assess not only surgeon’s skills/accuracy and specific action/perception sequences and limits, but also haptic teleoperator safety.