Article by Wayne Gillam, Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
UW ECE doctoral student Niveditha Kalavakonda is engineering an autonomous robotic assistant for providing surgical suction. This device is at the leading edge of technology and is helping to explore a new field: collaborative human-robot interaction in surgical environments. Kalavakonda is also a 2024 Yang Award recipient, has received numerous other awards and honors during her time in the Department, and she is exceptionally engaged with faculty, students, and staff.
If one were to try to imagine a robot in a medical setting, it could bring to mind images from science fiction movies, such as Star Wars, where medical droids work alongside doctors and surgeons to heal their patients. And in fact, it was imagery such as this that first inspired UW ECE doctoral student Niveditha (Nivii) Kalavakonda, who became fascinated with robotics at an early age through science fiction books and movies.
“I knew early on that I wanted to be in robotics, and I figured that studying engineering would be the obvious step to move into that space,” Kalavakonda said. “I also thought electrical engineering sounded like a good place to be because it would provide me with insight into both software and hardware.”
Kalavakonda was also introduced to medical settings at a young age. Growing up in Chennai, India, as the daughter of a neurosurgeon, she witnessed the impact of her father’s work through many grateful patients, some of whom remained in contact with him decades after their surgeries were complete. Given this background, it’s perhaps not surprising that today, Kalavakonda is building her own robot at UW ECE, one that is infused with artificial intelligence and engineered to work alongside surgeons.
But the road from India to UW ECE had a few twists and turns along the way. After high school, Kalavakonda chose to pursue a degree in electronics and communications engineering at the Amrita School of Engineering in Coimbatore, India. She studied circuits and basic control systems there, but the school’s engineering program did not focus on robotics or research as much as she would have liked. However, after receiving her bachelor’s degree in 2014, she spent a pivotal year at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where she worked in the lab of Professor Asokan Thondiyath. There, she was exposed to research in different areas of robotics. In a fortuitous twist of fate, she was tasked with working in virtual reality and building a simulator for a surgical robotic arm that the lab was developing. Kalavakonda said she felt immediately drawn to the project because she saw the potential impact it could have on shaping healthcare in India.
“I fully expect that Nivii’s work will actually help to launch a new subfield, surgical human-robot interaction, as a new community within both the HRI and surgical robotics communities.” — UW ECE Professor Blake Hannaford
It was in Thondiyath’s lab that Kalavakonda came across research by UW ECE Professor Blake Hannaford, who later became her adviser throughout her graduate studies. Kalavakonda had been admitted to several graduate schools after receiving her bachelor’s degree, but she said that she ended up choosing UW ECE because Hannaford’s lab had valuable collaborations with medical institutions. She also was drawn to the fact that Hannaford and his graduate students in the UW BioRobotics Laboratory built hardware like the RAVEN surgical robot. In 2015, Kalavakonda moved to Seattle and started working toward her master’s degree at UW ECE with Hannaford as her adviser. And in 2016, she joined the UW BioRobotics Lab. The following year, she was accepted into the Department’s doctoral degree program.
This photo and the one below shows Kalavakonda setting up a collaborative human-robot interaction experiment designed to have a surgeon and a robot perform tasks in parallel to achieve a shared goal. Here, the RAVEN grasper tool was retrofitted with a suction device to operate within a laparoscopic surgery training task. The surgeon performs a peg transfer sequence while the robot autonomously clears away simulated bleeding points.
During her time as a graduate student at UW ECE, Kalavakonda has been involved in several projects aimed at bringing leading-edge technologies into medical settings. These projects included working in the UW Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab on providing haptic feedback to users of a myoelectric prosthesis (an artificial limb that uses electrical signals from muscles in the remaining limb to move), developing software for the Microsoft HoloLens that could help surgeons at UW Medicine precisely locate tumors to be excised from the body, and developing remote calibration for cochlear implants at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She also has held internships at Apple, Amazon, and Nvidia, which expanded her knowledge and experience in artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer vision.
Kalavakonda received her master’s degree in electrical engineering from UW ECE in 2017, and she expects to graduate with her doctoral degree from the Department at the end of winter quarter 2025. She has already received many awards and honors for her work and engagement in the Department, but it’s the topic of her doctoral dissertation that has perhaps created the greatest buzz.
“Nivii came to the UW with an exciting background in virtual reality programming. She very quickly dove into a medical application of augmented reality, and her dissertation represents her ambitious vision of an autonomous robotic assistant for neurosurgery,” Hannaford said. “I fully expect that Nivii’s work will actually help to launch a new subfield, surgical human-robot interaction, as a new community within both the HRI and surgical robotics communities.”
Yang Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student
Kalavakonda, alongside UW mechanical engineering graduate student Tin Chiang (left) and UW ECE doctoral student Hoanan Peng (right), set up a teleoperation experiment for the RAVEN II surgical robot.
In May 2024, Kalavakonda received the Yang Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student at UW ECE for researching human-robot interaction designed for healthcare environments and for building community in the Department through various leadership initiatives. The Yang Award recognizes a UW ECE doctoral student in their final year of study who has conducted outstanding research in the field of electrical and computer engineering as evidenced by their publications or recognized by outside researchers in the field.
The Yang Award was established by successful entrepreneur and former UW ECE faculty member Andrew T. Yang, who has been one of the most influential people in the electronic design automation industry for nearly three decades. Yang is known for being a visionary in both research and entrepreneurship. The purpose of the award is to recognize and encourage outstanding doctoral student research contributions to the field of electrical engineering. The award goes to one qualifying student per year and is open to all doctoral degree candidates in UW ECE. Receiving the Yang Award is considered a high honor and helps to create career opportunities for the recipient.
“It’s reaffirming to hear from the leaders of our Department that I’m doing good research that they believe in, and it helps me to believe in my research a little bit more,” Kalavakonda said. “The award also has helped me realize that academia is where I want to be.”
In addition to the Yang Award, Kalavakonda has received several other honors during her time at UW ECE, including being named this year as one of the Husky 100 — a group of top students at the UW. She also was a part of the Robotics Science and Systems Pioneers Cohort in 2021, received an Irene Peden Fellowship in 2022, and was named an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Rising Star in 2023. And it was an Amazon Catalyst Fellowship award she received in 2017 that gave her an opportunity to put the thesis of her doctoral dissertation into action, launching her development of an intelligent robot that could assist a surgeon.
An autonomous robotic assistant for surgical suction
A closeup showing pegs, beads, and artificial blood used to test the robot’s ability to provide suction alongside a surgeon in a tight operating environment.
Robotic surgery has many advantages for patients, including minimal invasion, reduced risk of infection, faster recovery time, and lessened scarring. Robots also have increased dexterity and vision capabilities as compared to humans, especially in hard-to-reach places inside the human body. In the medical field today, there are already robots operating as extensions of surgeons’ hands as well as robotic systems being developed for entirely automated processes. However, Kalavakonda’s research is focused on building a robot that can understand the surgical environment and the people in it while operating independently. This robot will perform assistive tasks alongside surgeons, identifying and performing dynamic actions without interfering with the surgeon’s physical motions or tools during surgery. This work is made possible through close collaboration with Dr. Laligam Sekhar and his fellows at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
To move toward this ambitious goal, Kalavakonda has developed software for the RAVEN surgical robot that empowers the device to perform a very specific task during neurosurgery— applying suction upon request, removing spots of blood that might block a surgeon’s vision. Because this is brain surgery, the robot is operating in a very narrow field of view of one to two centimeters in diameter. The software helps the robot to understand this tiny surgical scene through computer vision and take actions using trajectory prediction.
Kalavakonda’s software also allows the robot to adapt to different surgeons and their behavior patterns while operating. To make this possible, Kalavakonda has created adaptive AI learning models to help the robot learn the environment, infer the surgeon’s intent, and not bump into surgical tools or the surroundings. This work has required Kalavakonda and her colleagues to dig deep into existing human-robot interaction research and conduct extensive user studies examining specific human behaviors in surgical environments. She also collaborates with the UW Science, Technology & Society Studies Certificate Program to study the changes in surgical team dynamics caused by different levels of automation in surgical robotics, and she confers with Professor Ryan Calo in the UW School of Law to better understand a law and policy perspective of her work.
“This is a very people-centric problem. If we only approach it with an engineering mindset, we may not be able to optimize for what would be helpful,” Kalavakonda said. “I strongly believe that we have to do both. We have to develop a human-centric understanding with an engineering perspective.”
Kalavakonda’s doctoral dissertation is producing a prototype and a proof of concept — proving that building this type of robot is possible. Her work then could be applied not only to neurosurgery, but also many other medical fields that might use robotics, such as orthopedics, gynecology, cardiac surgery, and retinal surgery. Her approach could also be applicable to the development of technology outside of medicine, such as self-driving cars and robotic home assistants. However, Kalavakonda’s long-term vision is to turn the prototype she has engineered into a medical product, so surgeons can someday use it in the operating room. She estimates that the timeline to real-world implementation will be approximately seven to 10 years. Once the robot is commercialized, it could be deployed in operating rooms around the world to assist surgeons. It would be useful in almost any type of surgical facility, but it could be especially valuable in remote, rural areas as well as in under-resourced communities.
A teacher, mentor and leader
Kalavakonda teleoperates the RAVEN II surgical robot, testing its ability to provide surgical suction. This performance will be compared to that of an autonomous suction algorithm designed for the robot using adaptive motion planning.
During her time at UW ECE, Kalavakonda has been involved in a wide range of activities outside the development of her doctoral dissertation, and she has collaborated and engaged with many faculty, students, and staff. In addition to Hannaford, she has worked in various capacities with UW ECE professors Howard Chizeck, Sam Burden, and Kim Ingraham, and considers them to be mentors. She has taught her own course at UW ECE, “Models of Robot Manipulation,” where she was the listed faculty of record. She has also helped to create course content for the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Engineering degree program in the UW College of Engineering. And she was a graduate student staff assistant in the Department, helping with the recruitment and admissions process. During this time, she started two student-led initiatives: the graduate applicant support program and virtual office hours, where prospective students could log in online and learn more about UW ECE from current graduate students. In 2019, she helped to found the UW ECE Student Advisory Committee, in 2020, she helped to launch the Department’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Committee, and she was part of the UW ECE Curriculum Committee this last year.
As if that all wasn’t enough, she also was founding chair for the Women in Engineering Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, chapter at the UW, was a founding board member of the Women in Computer Vision Society, and she has spoken on panels and received an Outstanding Female Engineer award in 2023 from the Women Engineers (WE) Rise program in the UW College of Engineering. In recognition of her exemplary commitment to UW ECE and her lasting impact, Kalavakonda received a 2022 Student Impact Award from the Department.
“I’ve had a lot of community, teaching, and mentorship-related experiences at UW ECE, in addition to pursuing my research, all of which have reinforced my belief that I want to be in academia,” Kalavakonda said. “The Department has always been there for me, and it has helped me to realize a lot of my ideas and bring them into action. These things were all possible for me because there is a community of supportive staff and faculty here. Many thanks to UW ECE staff members, including Stephanie Swanson, Jennifer Huberman, and Mack Carter for helping me realize my ideas.”
Future plans
Looking ahead, after receiving her doctoral degree, Kalavakonda said that she would like to pursue a faculty position in academia, and she would like to continue the research she started at UW ECE. She is keenly interested in building human-centered technology in health care applications that will benefit people. And, specifically, she is intent on making the autonomous robotic surgical assistant she has envisioned a reality.
Pursuing a postdoctoral position that will point her in that direction and allow her to develop a skill set complementary to what she has learned at UW ECE will be Kalavakonda’s next step. She imagines that this position most likely will be outside of the medical space, but it still will be studying human-robot interaction. She also anticipates that it will help to provide her with many new tools she can apply to engineering medical devices.
Kalavakonda said that she is looking forward to eventually securing a faculty position and teaching students in that capacity. In addition to the courses she has taught at UW ECE, she has mentored many graduate, undergraduate, and high school students during her time in the Department. She said that, in addition to her research, she enjoys teaching and wants to help as many students as she can. She also noted the importance of centering people in everything she does.
“I want to keep questioning and explore and identify where the research gaps are. To do that, it’s really important to have conversations with the people we want to use our technologies,” Kalavakonda said. “I believe that building devices by including the people that you want to help will always result in better technology.”