Maram Sakr

I am a PhD student at Mechanical Engineering Departement at the University of British Columbia. I am working as a research assistant at the CARIS Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Croft and Dr. Machiel Van der Loos . I completed my MASc degree at the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University where I worked as a research assistant at the MENRVA Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Carlo Menon. Before joining MENRVA, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Network Systems Lab(NSL). I received my B.Sc. degree in Computers and Systems Engineering from Mansoura University, Egypt. For further information, please see my resume.


Research Interests:

Projects:

1."LOST Highway: a Multiple-Lane Ant-Trail Algorithm to Reduce Congestion in Large-Population Multi-Robot Systems": We addressed the problem of spatial interference between robots in dense robot populations. The basic idea of our work was inspired by what is done in traffic engineering to reduce congestion in roads. One possible solution for this problem is to widen the roads by adding/constructing new lanes. Our work was to let the robots move in multiple trails, like real ants, and each trail represented a lane. Each robot moved only in one trail in each direction while avoiding all the others. To test our work, we considered the resource transportation task between two locations. Our robots were able to transport more resources than previous works in this area by up to 3.9 times. [pdf]
2. "A Wind Turbine Cloud Control System": In this project, we developed a full cloud control system, where the controllers are software modules deployed on virtual machines in the cloud. My role in this project involved developing the Human Machine Interface (HMI), the controlled system which was a wind-turbine virtual environment to verify our design. [pptx]
3. "One-eyed Self-learning Robotic Arm": The motivation of our design was to build a vision-based robotic arm with industrial applications, such as painting car doors in the automotive industry. At that time, automotive painting proved problematic for both employees and manufacturing engineers. Having people apply paints jobs exposed them to high levels of chemical toxicity, while robotic implementations required frequent reprogramming with assembly line restructuring. Our robot was able to recognize doors with preprogrammed brush paths, as well as develop new brush paths for doors that hadn’t been encountered before.

Publications:

1. Maram Sakr, Waleed Uddin, and H.F. Machiel Van der Loos. "Orthographic Vision-based Interface with Various Control Modalities for Robot Arm Teleoperation". submitted to International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
2. Wesley Patrick Chan, Maram Sakr, Camilo Alfonso Perez Quintero, Elizabeth Croft, and H.F. Machiel Van der Loos. "A Hands-free, Tether-free Multimodal Augmented Reality System for Robot Trajectory Programming and Execution: A Comparison of Control Interfaces". submitted to International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
3. Alaa Eldin Abdelaal, Maram Sakr, Apeksha Avinash, Shahed Khan Mohammed, Armaan Kaur Bajwa, Mohakta Sahni, Soheil Hor, Sidney Fels, Septimiu E. Salcudean. "Play Me Back: A Unified Training Platform for Robotic and Laparoscopic Surgery". submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
4. Maram Sakr, Xianta Jiang, and Carlo Menon. "Estimation of User-applied Isometric Force/Torque using Upper Extremity Force Myography". submitted to Journal of Bionic Engineering.
5. Maram Sakr, and Carlo Menon. "Exploratory Evaluation of the Force Myography (FMG) Signals Usage for Admittance Control of a Linear Actuator". In proc. of the 7th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, 2018. [pdf]
6. Mona L. Delva, Maram Sakr, Ra’na Chengani, Mahta Khoshnam Tehrani and Carlo Menon. "Investigation into the Potential to Create a Force Myography-based Smart-home Controller for Aging Populations". In proc. of the 7th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, 2018. [pdf]
7. Wesley Patrick Chan, Camilo Perez Quintero, Matthew K. X. J. Pan, Maram Sakr, H.F. Machiel Van der Loos, and Elizabeth Croft. "A Multimodal System using Augmented Reality, Gestures, and Tactile Feedback for Robot Trajectory Programming and Execution". International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018 Workshop on Robotics in Virtual Reality. [pdf]
8. Maram Sakr, and Carlo Menon. "Study on the Force Myography Sensors Placement for Robust Hand Force Estimation". In proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Banff, Canada. October 2017. [pdf]
9. Alaa Eldin Abdelaal, Maram Sakr, Richard Vaughan. "LOST Highway: a Multiple-Lane Ant-Trail Algorithm to Reduce Congestion in Large-Population Multi-Robot Systems". In Proc. of the 14th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV), Edmonton, Alberta, May 2017. [pdf]
10. Ra’na Chengani, Mona L. Delva, Maram Sakr and Carlo Menon. “Pilot study on strategies in sensor placement for robust hand/wrist gesture classification based on movement related changes in forearm volume”. In proc. of the 2016 IEEE Healthcare Innovation Point-Of-Care Technologies Conference (HI-POCT), Cancun, Mexico. 2016. [pdf]
11. Maram Sakr and Carlo Menon. “On the estimation of isometric wrist/forearm torque about three axes using Force Myography”. In proc. of the 6th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, Singapore. 2016. [pdf]
12. Maram Sakr and Carlo Menon. “Regressing force-myographic signals collected by an armband to estimate torque exerted by the wrist: a preliminary investigation”. In proc. of the IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, Vancouver, Canada. 2016. [pdf]

Contact: