Automaton

Photo: David Clugston for IEEE Spectrum

Last year, Blake Hannaford and Jacob Rosen of the University of Washington’s BioRobotics Lab wrote an article for Spectrum about their surgical robot, Raven, and a field test in the California rangelands, where a surgeon commanded the robot remotely.

Early this year, Raven headed out to another extreme environment: the Aquarius underwater habitat off Key Largo, Florida. In the experiment, part of NASA's Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) project, surgeons teleoperated the two-armed robot all the way from Seattle.

Automaton spoke with Hannaford to get the details.

Although some people claim their mouths operate independently of their brains, that's not usually the case. The brain sends neurological signals to the larynx, which converts them into sound. Now, what if we could use those larynx nerve signals to control things?

That's exactly what a company called Ambient is doing. Its Audeo technology basically converts "unspoken speech" (neurological signals flowing through larynx nerves when a person thinks about speaking) into control commands that can be used to guide a motorized wheelchair (video above) or synthesize speech. Pretty amazing!

The company apparently stole the show this month at National Instrument's NI Week in Austin. Ambient's founder and CEO, Michael Callahan, gave a demonstration of the company's "thought-controlled" wheelchair and "thought-to-speech" translation system. (You can see the demo at the NI Week video page; it's the last segment, called "Algorithm Engineering," on the August 7 list.)

To use the system, a person wears a lightweight sensor band around the neck. The band picks up the larynx nerve signals and transmits them wirelessly to a remote computer (don't worry about "mind wiretapping" -- the transmission is encrypted.) The remote computer uses NI LabVIEW and signal processing algorithms to interpret the nerve-impulse patterns and translate them into the right commands.

The system is not plug-and-play. It does require some training until its algorithms learn to "read your mind" (accuracy is above 70 percent). But at least it doesn't require Matrix-style brain interfaces or a tangle of EEG electrodes wrapped around your head.

Callahan, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hopes to commercialize the technology to improve the lives of severely disable people with spinal cord injuries or such neurological disorders as ALS and cerebral palsy. (The company is backed by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.)

OK -- not exactly related to robotics, but very cybernetic nonetheless. I wonder what things we might control with this technology one day. Any guesses?

I've had it in my mind for some time that my grandparents could really benefit from a robotic companion -- someone to let them know when one of the grandkids has emailed, to remind them to take their meds (even to go get the pills for them), to keep an eye on their health and safety, and so on. And I knew Japan, among other Asian countries, has really been at the forefront of this research.

But I wasn't expecting to learn today that robots seem to be less exciting to the elderly than expected. Apparently, the Ifbot in question spent a month entertaining the residents of a nursing home before they got bored with it. What has been successful, however, are lower-tech products like the i-pot send an update to family every time someone makes tea with it, to show that Grandma or Grandpa is up and around. Really interesting reading for anyone considering the elder care market.

Thanks for the tip, Gui!

Photos: Barry Trimmer/Tufts University

A soft-bodied caterpillarlike robot prototype developed by researchers at Tufts University will be part of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The MoMA exhibition, called Design and the Elastic Mind (24 February to 12 May 2008), will showcase examples of "disruptive innovation" -- objects, projects, and concepts from designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world.

The Tufts team, led by biology professor Barry Trimmer and biomedical engineering professor David Kaplan, drew inspiration from the Manduca sexta caterpillar to build the squishable "softbot" prototype, about 30.5 cm long and made of silicon elastomer.

The researchers, based at Tufts' Medford/Somerville, Mass. campus, say the biomimetic robot could be used in emergency search and rescue operations, medical diagnosis and treatment, and manufacturing and aerospace applications.

IEEE Spectrum's Sarah Adee reports:

Dean Kamen's “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If DARPA gives the project the green light—and some greenbacks—the state-of-the-art bionic arm will go into clinical trials. If all goes well, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives its approval, returning veterans could be wearing the new artificial limb by next year.

The Luke arm grew out of DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was created in 2005 to fund the development of two arms. The first initiative, the four-year, US $30.4 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics contract, to be completed in 2009, led by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., seeks a fully functioning, neurally controlled prosthetic arm using technology that is still experimental. The latter, awarded to Deka Research and Development Corp., Kamen’s New Hampshire–based medical products company (perhaps best known for the Segway), is a two-year $18.1 million 2007 effort to give amputees an advanced prosthesis that could be available immediately “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Kamen’s team designed the Deka arm to be controlled with noninvasive measures, using an interface a bit like a joystick.

Continue reading...

Photo: Dirk van der Merwe

Sarah Adee's article on Dean Kamen's Luke Skywalker-like bionic arm created quite a buzz, but her video report is even better:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=221

The world's robot population has reached 4.49 million, and that number should nearly double by 2010 to 8.37 million. That's one automaton for every person in Austria, whatever that means! But we've written about that already: we put together these numbers based on data from the latest edition of World Robotics, a survey by the International Federation of Robotics released late last year.

Now we're looking again at this number-filled report and highlighting some of its best stuff. We want to know: What kinds of robots are out there? Where are they toiling around? And how fast are the silicon-brained things multiplying?

First, a recap: The World Robotics study divides robots in two main categories: industrial robots and service robots. The first category includes welding systems, assembly manipulators, silicon-wafer handlers—you know, that kind of heavy, expensive, several-degrees-of-freedom stuff. The second category is divided in two subcategories: professional service robots (things like bomb-disposal bots, surgical systems, milking robots) and personal service robots (vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, all sorts of robot hobby kits and toys).

Below you'll find 10 statistics about the world's robotics market we thought you'd want to know. (All data from the World Robotics study except the world robot population figures -- see note [1] at the end.) The stats after the jump.

The Global Robotics Institute at the Florida Hospital has just hosted the Third Annual World Robotic Urology Symposium, which brought together 600 healthcare professionals, including world leaders in robotic surgery, from around the globe. The field of robotic surgery is slowly building followers among surgeons, who swear by its accuracy and precision. In addition, robotic surgery promises reduced costs, mostly due to shorter anesthesia, less blood loss, smaller wounds and, ultimately, shorter hospital stays. And then there's always the possibility of remote robot surgery, promising to save lives in remote communities, war zones, and disaster-stricken areas - or simply allowing you to be operated by the top surgeon of your choice, without the need to fly around the globe.

This year's conference program included 10 live surgeries beamed in from around the country. The not-so-faint-hearted can follow future live internet broadcasts online - the next live robot surgery webcast is scheduled for tomorrow, March 26th, 12.00pm PST.

In spite of its youth, robotic surgery has already made itself a bad name with some patients: Germany's RoboDoc debacle has resulted in over 100 lawsuits of patients suffering muscular and nerve tissue damage after undergoing robot-assisted hip-replacement surgery. Nevertheless, Germany has just re-invested 13 Mio Euro in the orthoMIT program to develop robotic surgical strategies.

For further reading, make sure to check out a previous post on underwater robot surgery as well as the 2006 IEEE Spectrum article Doc at a distance.

Image: The Da Vinci Surgical Robot

Spectrum associate editor Sally Adee on how researchers are looking for a way to connect prosthetics directly to the brain. [Click on the image below to go to the video player.]

Spectrum reports that Caltech researchers are developing a MEMS robotic device to insert and position electrodes in the brain. The system could enhance the performance of neural prosthetics, which have proved hard to implant accurately. The researchers haven't built the device yet, but they've devised control algorithms to guide the miniature robots to make good neural connections. From the article:

The Caltech team has designed a system that would make the procedure more predictable by attaching a tiny MEMS-based motor to each electrode on a multichannel electrode array and using an algorithm to direct the electrodes to individual neurons.

[...]

As the electrodes are driven into the tissue, the software starts taking sample recordings to detect spikes of electrical activity at the electrode tip. When the software detects spikes, it moves forward in small increments and tracks how the signals change. After determining whether the signal has improved or gotten worse, the algorithm moves the electrode to a new position and does more recording and comparing, driving the electrode in further if necessary until it finds the best signal. If the signal wanes, the algorithm will automatically adjust the electrode position to improve the signal.

"Engineers are finally putting some practical exoskeletons through their paces outside of laboratories," Spectrum declared in 2005. Well, it was a slow but steady pace. Now it seems the bionic body suits are really ready to hit the market.

Sarcos/Raytheon have showed off their XOS full-body exo. And Japan's Cyberdyne has announced it will begin "mass-production" of its HAL powered suit.

Now Berkeley Bionics says it is "accepting orders for prototype HULC systems," one of its advanced lower-extremity exoskeletons.

The company, founded by researchers from the UC Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory, has recently released a video of its ExoHiker system, which lets a user carry loads of up to 200 lb, shadowing the wearer's maneuvers -- you can crawl, run, kick, climb stairs and the powered legs follow your moves.

We at Spectrum would love to borrow one of these ExoHiker legs to test them on the streets of New York as we, um, climb stairs of subway stations and fight off muggers.

UPDATE: After the jump, watch videos of Sarcos/Raytheon's XOS and Cyberdyne's HAL so you can compare all three exos ... and put in your order.

Perhaps one day we'll be able to shop online for bionic body devices like soccer-programmed prosthetic legs or Google neural interfaces, but in the meantime check out Spectrum's Bionic Body Shop below to see the medical devices that are already out there (or almost).

The "shop" is part of our special report on the Singularity, the positive-feedback techno-explosion that will spring smarter-than-human intelligence into existence and make us invincible, or kill us. But here's the big question: Is the digital Apollo below wearing a Speedo or what?

The Bionic Body Shop
Advanced medical devices are the tools that enable humans and robots to merge, perhaps signalling the dawn of a technological singularity. How close are we now? Take a tour and shop around--we've been cramming more intricate engineering into our bodies than you might think.

PS: Can't read the text in the Flash animation? A larger version is here.