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© 2011, 2012 Health Futures Digest
| A new robot to support daily living introduced by Hitachi is evidence of Japan’s vision of the need and market for robots, and of its skill in developing them. However, the country’s strategic robotics initiative could be another “Fifth Generation Project”* in the making, and the West may soon catch up or overtake it. At Cornell University, for example, researchers have built a complex, flexible robot that can self-replicate (a development which, thinks one leading medical nanotechnologist, is dangerous). Another sign that the Japanese lead in robotics is slipping: If Honda’s Asimo humanoid is nudged aside, there’s a chance it will fall over. Not so the French-American RABBIT robot.
The finding that the brain of a monkey fitted with a robotic arm and an implanted “brain chip” interface was able to adapt to and control the robot arm is strong evidence of the potential for brain-operated devices to give the handicapped the ability to control their environment. But direct connections to the brain may not always be necessary. One developer of prosthetic legs is building brains into the limbs: Sensors and computer chips in the knee and ankle bring the new prosthetics much closer to mimicking real legs. Also:
*In the 1980s, Japan mounted a sizeable government-led campaign, called the Fifth Generation Project, to become pre-eminent in artificial intelligence through building massively parallel supercomputers. The project was scrapped after a few years, but be it noted that a Japanese supercomputer, the Earth Simulator, was world champion for the past couple of years until IBM’s Blue Gene was deployed a month ago. |
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| EMIEW from Hitachi
Hitachi’s new EMIEW (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate) robot can move around a home while interacting in dialog with humans. It has a self-balancing two-wheel motion mechanism enabling it to turn on a dime, and it will keep pace (up to 6 km/h) with its human companion. Collision-avoidance sensors and real-time re-mapping enable it to complete a movement even if impeded. A vision sensor, multiple audio sensors, motion-capture software, and voice and face recognition software enable it to locate, recognize, and track its human companion and communicate over a distance of about a meter. It has high-quality speech synthesis technology to respond in a natural-sounding voice. EMIEW also has two arms, each with six degrees of freedom, and two hands to grasp things and carry them about. Japan Not In the Lead, After All In a recently published Strategic Technology Roadmap created by 300 scientists and engineers, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry predicts that in 2025 Japan will have household robot nurses to lift elderly or disabled people into wheelchairs from their beds, a cleaning robot to vacuum and mop floors without human supervision, and a separate robot to move furniture out of the way. And yet, the Yomiuri Shinbun has put its readers on notice that Japan may be losing the lead in robotics. It points out that while Japanese robots on show at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi dance and play the trumpet, US-made robots are doing important things such as crawling through mud and debris in Afghanistan and Iraq, carrying out reconnaissance missions, defusing bombs, and even firing guns under remote control. Honda’s celebrated Asimo can jog, shake hands, and climb stairs, but in the US, Foster-Miller’s SWAT police robot can climb stairs, break through locked doors with an onboard power saw, locate suspects with a night-vision camera, and even shoot them. Though the Foster-Miller robots are human-controlled, the second US Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Grand Challenge race this October will find autonomous vehicles racing a 280 kilometers desert course with no human guidance — and no Japanese challengers. “The United States spends like a hundred times more budget on robotics,” a Japanese commercial robot company director told the Yomiuri. “They sell more robots in the United States than Japan. . . . we are not the leading country when it comes to robotics. We’re way behind. We’re a million miles behind what the United States is doing.” Still, it’s trying. Tmsuk and Sanyo are collaborating to market a household security robot some time in the autumn. But Japan must also keep an eye on South Korea, which is feverishly at work on similar domestic robots, and on Sweden, where a company has introduced a spherical rolling robot to patrol parking lots and warehouses. Cornell University researchers have built a complex, flexible robot that can self-replicate. It consists of four cubes stacked on top of each other (more cubes would result in a more complex robot.) Each 10x10x10 cm cube is sliced diagonally into halves that can rotate against each other, thus changing the shape of the robot. The robot copies itself using electromagnets to assemble a set of loose cubes into a structure just like the original. Each cube cubes contains what Andreas von Bubnoff in Nature calls “the electronic equivalent of DNA: a microprocessor with a memory of the robot’s body plan and instructions on what to do during self-replication.” A robot made up of hundreds of much smaller blocks would have a huge number of shape options available to it. The lead researcher would like to see if an un-programmed robot would “spontaneously learn how to self-reproduce using evolutionary principles.” Robert Freitas, a leading medical nanotechnologist, thinks that “As a matter of public policy, artificial machine systems should not be built that evolve, so that there can be no danger of them escaping our control.” His fears may or may not be misplaced, and since they may not, he is right to sound a public policy alarm. In this age of accelerating technological advance, the potential advent of autonomous, self-replicating robots – including invisible nanobots – is no longer science fictional speculation. A two-legged robot called RABBIT developed by University of Michigan and French scientists can catch its balance when shoved, more naturally than other humanoid robots in existence that have large feet to avoid tipping over. RABBIT has no feet – its legs end in points. The balance control algorithm developed by the research team predicts every movement based on a built-in model of the dynamics of walking and balance, and could be used in intelligent prosthetics that adapt to the person, rather than forcing the person to adapt to the prosthetic. Robotic Prosthetic Limbs/BMI Advance After analyzing the masses of cellular-level neural data from experiments in 2003 in which a monkey was implanted with a brain chip enabling it to control a robot arm with only its mind, Duke University researchers found that the monkey’s brain adapted to treat the arm as if it were its own appendage. While the animals were still able to use their own arms, some brain cells formerly used for that control shifted to control of the robotic arm, supporting the researchers’ controversial theory that “the brain has extraordinary abilities to adapt to incorporate artificial tools, whether directly controlled by the brain or through the appendages.” In other words, “a fundamental trait of higher primates, in particular apes and humans, is the ability to incorporate … tools into the very structure of the brain,” and this in turn leads to the philosophical hypothesis that our sense of self incorporates our tools and not just our bodies. The clinical significance of the findings is that the dynamic restructuring of the brain means that dexterity in a “neuroprosthetic” need not be just a function of the technology. Dexterity will emerge, as it were, to give patients a full range of mobility in robot arms, hands, or other appendages. The researchers’ latest experiments seek to enable the brain to obtain sensory (visual and/or haptic) feedback from neuroprosthetic devices, which would greatly enhance people’s ability to learn and use the devices and expand their utility and use. Source: Lok, Corie (2005). “10 Emerging Technologies.” Technology Review, May. One of MIT Technology Review‘s top “10 Emerging Technologies” picks was “Biomechatronics,” exemplified by a commercially available prosthetic leg knee joint with built-in sensors that can measure how far the knee is bent and the force acting on it during walking. It also contains a computer chip that analyzes the sensor data to create a model of the user’s gait, and adapts the movement and resistance of the knee accordingly. The technology is being extended by an MIT professor to add sensors below the knee joint to detect neural signals from nearby muscles and transmit that information to a computer chip in a prosthetic ankle joint, which will translate those impulses into instructions for the ankle’s motors. Himself a double leg amputee, the professor thinks it inevitable that biomechatronics will ultimately combine with tissue engineering to create prosthetic limbs made of both artificial materials and human tissue. A robotic arm with four pneumatic muscles and movable at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist is being developed to help stroke survivors regain the ability to reach and grasp objects. It appears that stroke survivors can recover significant use of their arms by performing repetitive motor function exercises over a period of time, but achieving this via conventional physical therapy is expensive, accounting for as much as four percent of the US national health budget. The new device enables the patient to do the physical therapy at home, without a therapist present. The first prototype was tested on eight able-bodied individuals and stroke survivors of varying size, and two stroke survivors completed a three-week course of therapy using the device. A second generation prototype is under development. Robotic Head/Neck Cancer Surgery University of Pennsylvania researchers have demonstrated in a mannequin and in a cadaver that using the daVinci surgical robot in trans-oral robotic surgery should significantly reduce operating time and surgical trauma, and allow for complete tumor removal of mouth and throat cancers while helping to preserve voice and swallowing function. They devised novel approaches to introduce the robot’s arms through the mouth into the throat and voice box. “The surgeons were able to manipulate different elements in the voice box with a high degree of dexterity that would be tremendously difficult using conventional instruments. They were also able to suture and tie knots deep in the mannequin’s throat with relative ease – a task exceptionally challenging without the aid of robotic technology,” says a university press release. A robotic dentist’s drill designed to take the complexity out of dental implant work could represent the first step towards automated – as well as cheaper, quicker, and less painful — dental procedures, The Israeli-made drill has been tested in animals and has received US approval to begin trials on humans. Its designer noted that it “brings dental implants to the general practitioner . . . . Today it is only done by experts.” Sensitive Skin for NASA Robots NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is opening a laboratory to develop a “High-Tech Skin” that will enable robots to sense their environment and react to it. NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration depends heavily on astronaut-robonaut cooperation, therefore robonauts need to be able to react to their environment much as humans do. The first prototype of the new skin will include more than 1,000 infrared sensors. Flexible plastic modules will house the skin’s electronics. |
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