The Da Vinci robotic surgical assistant has been approved in the US for CABG surgeries.

The pace of adoption of service as opposed to surgical
robots in US hospitals is slow but heading inexorably upwards.

Efforts to endow robots with tactile
skin are beginning to get into high gear.

The Japanese have built a prototype robotic wheel that can not only move over
uneven terrain but does it without being attached to a drive train of any sort.

The days of massive, expensive farm machines are numbered. Armies of cheap,
autonomous, robotic �agricultural ants� will
likely replace them, and do a better job into the bargain.

She writes with some authority, having visited SRI International, a
non-profit organization that operates one of the United States� leading robotics
research centers The �holy grail� — �an autonomous robot that walks and
understands and responds to human commands� could also �swim, fly or wriggle�
using artificial muscles made of electroactive polymers, under development at
SRI. Robots powered by motors and gears are not going to make the cut, one
researcher told her, because �they are heavy and require not only large power
supplies but significant computational ability as each movement must be
precisely calculated.�

In May, SRI obtained US$2.5 million in first-round venture funding to create
a company called Artificial Muscle to commercialize its patented technology.

The growth of the robotics industry, one analyst told her, is currently �very
similar to the PC industry in 1977.�

Reference: Poletti, Therese (2004). “We,
Robots: Forget Robots That Walk. Valley Researchers Want Them To Climb, Jump,
Swim And Fly.” Mercury News, July 12.

Da Vinci Approved for Bypass Surgery

Intuitive Surgical�s Da Vinci robotic surgical assistant has been
approved by the US Federal Drug Administration for use in coronary artery bypass
surgery. The acting FDA Commissioner called the approval �a step forward in new
robotic technology that eventually could change the practice of heart surgery.�
The Da Vinci is already approved and in use for gall bladder and some
other surgeries.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “U.S.
Clears New Use for Robot-Like Surgical Device.” Reuters, July 7.

Hospital Service Robots

To lower costs and �free up workers for more critical tasks,� says an AP
newswire, �hospital officials are turning more and more to robots . . . .� such
as TUG, RoboCart, and HelpMate. However, the vague number
of �six dozen to about 120� robots deployed currently does not lend a great deal
of credibility to the �turning more and more� bit.

Anecdotally, a nursing supervisor at a Texas VA hospital that has two
HelpMates found them “wonderful and they talk to you in Spanish and
English. The nursing staff is pleased with them and most people just stare
because they’re wandering around the hospital.” But a TUG at a Pittsburgh
hospital would not get on an elevator if a button was pushed (indicating that
someone else is was using the elevator), and it freaked out trying to navigate
around two scraps of paper on the floor.

Montefiore Medical Center in New York City has used a HelpMate for
about five years and, in May, TUG�s manufacturer won a contract to supply
robots to VA hospitals nationwide.

A 2000 study by Manuel Rosetti, an assistant professor of engineering at the
University of Arkansas, found that the University of Virginia Hospital could
save as much as $218,000 a year if it replaced 15 human couriers with six
HelpMate robots, which would pay for themselves in little over three
years.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Courier
robots get traction in hospitals.” Associated Press via CNN, July 6.

Sensitive Skin

Japanese scientists are developing an electronic skin for robots that will be
as sensitive to touch as human skin. Tactile capability will likely do as much
to advance robotics as vision and voice recognition capability, but it has
received far less attention. Touch receptors made of plastics such as
polyvinylidene fluoride that generate an electric field when squeezed are
already used to make pressure-sensitive pads for computer keyboards and other
touch-triggered devices, reports Philip Ball in Nature.

The artificial skin is made of a rubbery polymer impregnated with graphite.
The electrical resistance of the sheet changes when it is squeezed, and the
change is detected by transistors under the skin. Conventional silicon
transistors are hard and brittle devices, making them unsuited for use in a
flexible environment, so the researchers made them from a flexible organic
material called pentacene. Currently, the transistors are 2.5 mm square, but the
researchers hope to reduce that size to .025 mm. Even at their current size,
skin made with them works even when wrapped around a bar just 2 mm wide.

The researchers also aim to add temperature and humidity sensitivity, and to
make the skin elastic and not just flexible. They believe their artificial skin
could find applications in sport, security, medicine, and other fields besides
robotics. Possibilities include pressure-sensitive carpets able to identify
people from their footprints, or sense if an elderly person had collapsed on it;
tactile mats to monitor the performance of athletes in the gym; and tactile seat
coverings to monitor the physical condition of car drivers.

Reference: Ball, Philip (2004). “Robots get sensitive:
Electronic skin could give machines a sophisticated sense of touch.” Nature,
June 30.

Shape Shifters

Wheel-shaped robots 4 centimeters in diameter by 1 centimeter thick move by
continuously altering their shape. The rim is an elastic polymer and the spokes
are made of a �shape memory� alloy that shrinks when heated by an electric
current and resumes its normal shape when it cools. The wheel turns when �the
spokes towards the front of the wheel are heated and shorten, causing the rim’s
point of contact with the ground to move backwards, behind the center of
gravity. As the wheel then tips forwards, other spokes are heated to deform the
rim again and keep the robot rolling along,� writes Will Knight in New
Scientist.

They move easily on level surfaces and can climb 20-degree slopes. They can
also jump 8 centimetres into the air by flattening to the maximum then quickly
returning to round. Their Japanese engineers� main aim was �to show that you do
not need rigid bodied crawler robots or wheeled vehicles to move over rough
ground,� says Knight.

Reference: Knight, Will (2004). “Robotic wheels
that just keep rolling.” New Scientist, June 4.

The Next Agricultural Revolution

University of Illinois agricultural engineers, with help from a visiting
Japanese scholar, have developed several �completely autonomous� agricultural
robots, according to a somewhat hyperbolic article in Red Nova. The goal,
said a researcher, is for �small, inexpensive robots to take on some of the
duties now performed by large, expensive farm equipment.�

One of the robots, that cost aboyt US$7,000 to build, can maneuver up and
down rows of corn using a laser to gauge the distance to corn plants. Another is
a foot-long, $150 “Ag Ant” designed to walk through crop rows on mechanical
legs, look for weeds, then radio companion �ants� to come help destroy any it
finds. A $500 model navigates down the rows using two ultrasonic and four cheap
infrared sensors used in simple motion detection sensors.

Eventually, such robots could be used to detect weeds, insects, and diseased
plants, to sample soil, and to apply pesticides parsimoniously yet precisely to
individual plants.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “The Future
Role for Autonomous Robots.” July 11.