Tag Archives: Hospital

#439051 ‘Neutrobots’ smuggle drugs ...

A team of researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology along with partners at the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, both in China, has developed a tiny robot that can ferry cancer drugs through the blood-brain barrier (BBB) without setting off an immune reaction. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their robot and tests with mice. Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, with the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, have published a Focus piece in the same journal issue on the work done by the team in China. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437758 Remotely Operated Robot Takes Straight ...

Roboticists love hard problems. Challenges like the DRC and SubT have helped (and are still helping) to catalyze major advances in robotics, but not all hard problems require a massive amount of DARPA funding—sometimes, a hard problem can just be something very specific that’s really hard for a robot to do, especially relative to the ease with which a moderately trained human might be able to do it. Catching a ball. Putting a peg in a hole. Or using a straight razor to shave someone’s face without Sweeney Todd-izing them.

This particular roboticist who sees straight-razor face shaving as a hard problem that robots should be solving is John Peter Whitney, who we first met back at IROS 2014 in Chicago when (working at Disney Research) he introduced an elegant fluidic actuator system. These actuators use tubes containing a fluid (like air or water) to transmit forces from a primary robot to a secondary robot in a very efficient way that also allows for either compliance or very high fidelity force feedback, depending on the compressibility of the fluid.

Photo: John Peter Whitney/Northeastern University

Barber meets robot: Boston based barber Jesse Cabbage [top, right] observes the machine created by roboticist John Peter Whitney. Before testing the robot on Whitney’s face, they used his arm for a quick practice [bottom].

Whitney is now at Northeastern University, in Boston, and he recently gave a talk at the RSS workshop on “Reacting to Contact,” where he suggested that straight razor shaving would be an interesting and valuable problem for robotics to work toward, due to its difficulty and requirement for an extremely high level of both performance and reliability.

Now, a straight razor is sort of like a safety razor, except with the safety part removed, which in fact does make it significantly less safe for humans, much less robots. Also not ideal for those worried about safety is that as part of the process the razor ends up in distressingly close proximity to things like the artery that is busily delivering your brain’s entire supply of blood, which is very close to the top of the list of things that most people want to keep blades very far away from. But that didn’t stop Whitney from putting his whiskers where his mouth is and letting his robotic system mediate the ministrations of a professional barber. It’s not an autonomous robotic straight-razor shave (because Whitney is not totally crazy), but it’s a step in that direction, and requires that the hardware Whitney developed be dead reliable.

Perhaps that was a poor choice of words. But, rest assured that Whitney lived long enough to answer our questions after. Here’s the video; it’s part of a longer talk, but it should start in the right spot, at about 23:30.

If Whitney looked a little bit nervous to you, that’s because he was. “This was the first time I’d ever been shaved by someone (something?!) else with a straight razor,” he told us, and while having a professional barber at the helm was some comfort, “the lack of feeling and control on my part was somewhat unsettling.” Whitney says that the barber, Jesse Cabbage of Dentes Barbershop in Somerville, Mass., was surprised by how well he could feel the tactile sensations being transmitted from the razor. “That’s one of the reasons we decided to make this video,” Whitney says. “I can’t show someone how something feels, so the next best thing is to show a delicate task that either from experience or intuition makes it clear to the viewer that the system must have these properties—otherwise the task wouldn’t be possible.”

And as for when Whitney might be comfortable getting shaved by a robotic system without a human in the loop? It’s going to take a lot of work, as do most other hard problems in robotics. “There are two parts to this,” he explains. “One is fault-tolerance of the components themselves (software, electronics, etc.) and the second is the quality of the perception and planning algorithms.”

He offers a comparison to self-driving cars, in which similar (or greater) risks are incurred: “To learn how to perceive, interpret, and adapt, we need a very high-fidelity model of the problem, or a wealth of data and experience, or both” he says. “But in the case of shaving we are greatly lacking in both!” He continues with the analogy: “I think there is a natural progression—the community started with autonomous driving of toy cars on closed courses and worked up to real cars carrying human passengers; in robotic manipulation we are beginning to move out of the ‘toy car’ stage and so I think it’s good to target high-consequence hard problems to help drive progress.”

The ultimate goal is much more general than the creation of a dedicated straight razor shaving robot. This particular hardware system is actually a testbed for exploring MRI-compatible remote needle biopsy.

Of course, the ultimate goal here is much more general than the creation of a dedicated straight razor shaving robot; it’s a challenge that includes a host of sub-goals that will benefit robotics more generally. This particular hardware system Whitney is developing is actually a testbed for exploring MRI-compatible remote needle biopsy, and he and his students are collaborating with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston on adapting this technology to prostate biopsy and ablation procedures. They’re also exploring how delicate touch can be used as a way to map an environment and localize within it, especially where using vision may not be a good option. “These traits and behaviors are especially interesting for applications where we must interact with delicate and uncertain environments,” says Whitney. “Medical robots, assistive and rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, and shared-autonomy teleoperation for delicate tasks.”
A paper with more details on this robotic system, “Series Elastic Force Control for Soft Robotic Fluid Actuators,” is available on arXiv. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437687 Video Friday: Bittle Is a Palm-Sized ...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
AUVSI EXPONENTIAL 2020 – October 5-8, 2020 – [Online]
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Rongzhong Li, who is responsible for the adorable robotic cat Nybble, has an updated and even more adorable quadruped that's more robust and agile but only costs around US $200 in kit form on Kickstarter.

Looks like the early bird options are sold out, but a full kit is a $225 pledge, for delivery in December.

[ Kickstarter ]

Thanks Rz!

I still maintain that Stickybot was one of the most elegantly designed robots ever.

[ Stanford ]

With the unpredictable health crisis of COVID-19 continuing to place high demands on hospitals, PAL Robotics have successfully completed testing of their delivery robots in Barcelona hospitals this summer. The TIAGo Delivery and TIAGo Conveyor robots were deployed in Hospital Municipal of Badalona and Hospital Clínic Barcelona following a winning proposal submitted to the European DIH-Hero project. Accerion sensors were integrated onto the TIAGo Delivery Robot and TIAGo Conveyor Robot for use in this project.

[ PAL Robotics ]

Energy Robotics, a leading developer of software solutions for mobile robots used in industrial applications, announced that its remote sensing and inspection solution for Boston Dynamics’s agile mobile robot Spot was successfully deployed at Merck’s thermal exhaust treatment plant at its headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany. Energy Robotics equipped Spot with sensor technology and remote supervision functions to support the inspection mission.

Combining Boston Dynamics’ intuitive controls, robotic intelligence and open interface with Energy Robotics’ control and autonomy software, user interface and encrypted cloud connection, Spot can be taught to autonomously perform a specific inspection round while being supervised remotely from anywhere with internet connectivity. Multiple cameras and industrial sensors enable the robot to find its way around while recording and transmitting information about the facility’s onsite equipment operations.

Spot reads the displays of gauges in its immediate vicinity and can also zoom in on distant objects using an externally-mounted optical zoom lens. In the thermal exhaust treatment facility, for instance, it monitors cooling water levels and notes whether condensation water has accumulated. Outside the facility, Spot monitors pipe bridges for anomalies.

Among the robot’s many abilities, it can detect defects of wires or the temperature of pump components using thermal imaging. The robot was put through its paces on a comprehensive course that tested its ability to handle special challenges such as climbing stairs, scaling embankments and walking over grating.

[ Energy Robotics ]

Thanks Stefan!

Boston Dynamics really should give Dr. Guero an Atlas just to see what he can do with it.

[ DrGuero ]

World's First Socially Distanced Birthday Party: Located in London, the robotic arm was piloted in real time to light the candles on the cake by the founder of Extend Robotics, Chang Liu, who was sat 50 miles away in Reading. Other team members in Manchester and Reading were also able to join in the celebration as the robot was used to accurately light the candles on the birthday cake.

[ Extend Robotics ]

The Robocon in-person competition was canceled this year, but check out Tokyo University's robots in action:

[ Robocon ]

Sphero has managed to pack an entire Sphero into a much smaller sphere.

[ Sphero ]

Squishy Robotics, a small business funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is developing mobile sensor robots for use in disaster rescue, remote monitoring, and space exploration. The shape-shifting, mobile, senor robots from UC-Berkeley spin-off Squishy Robotics can be dropped from airplanes or drones and can provide first responders with ground-based situational awareness during fires, hazardous materials (HazMat) release, and natural and man-made disasters.

[ Squishy Robotics ]

Meet Jasper, the small girl with big dreams to FLY. Created by UTS Animal Logic Academy in partnership with the Royal Australian Air Force to encourage girls to soar above the clouds. Jasper was created using a hybrid of traditional animation techniques and technology such as robotics and 3D printing. A KUKA QUANTEC robot is used during the film making to help the Australian Royal Airforce tell their story in a unique way. UTS adapted their High Accurate robot to film consistent paths, creating a video with physical sets and digital characters.

[ AU AF ]

Impressive what the Ghost Robotics V60 can do without any vision sensors on it.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

Is your job moving tiny amounts of liquid around? Would you rather be doing something else? ABB’s YuMi got you.

[ Yumi ]

For his PhD work at the Media Lab, Biomechatronics researcher Roman Stolyarov developed a terrain-adaptive control system for robotic leg prostheses. as a way to help people with amputations feel as able-bodied and mobile as possible, by allowing them to walk seamlessly regardless of the ground terrain.

[ MIT ]

This robot collects data on each cow when she enters to be milked. Milk samples and 3D photos can be taken to monitor the cow’s health status. The Ontario Dairy Research Centre in Elora, Ontario, is leading dairy innovation through education and collaboration. It is a state-of-the-art 175,000 square foot facility for discovery, learning and outreach. This centre is a partnership between the Agricultural Research Institute of Ontario, OMAFRA, the University of Guelph and the Ontario dairy industry.

[ University of Guleph ]

Australia has one of these now, should the rest of us panic?

[ Boeing ]

Daimler and Torc are developing Level 4 automated trucks for the real world. Here is a glimpse into our closed-course testing, routes on public highways in Virginia, and self-driving capabilities development. Our year of collaborating on the future of transportation culminated in the announcement of our new truck testing center in New Mexico.

[ Torc Robotics ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437645 How Robots Became Essential Workers in ...

Photo: Sivaram V/Reuters

A robot, developed by Asimov Robotics to spread awareness about the coronavirus, holds a tray with face masks and sanitizer.

As the coronavirus emergency exploded into a full-blown pandemic in early 2020, forcing countless businesses to shutter, robot-making companies found themselves in an unusual situation: Many saw a surge in orders. Robots don’t need masks, can be easily disinfected, and, of course, they don’t get sick.

An army of automatons has since been deployed all over the world to help with the crisis: They are monitoring patients, sanitizing hospitals, making deliveries, and helping frontline medical workers reduce their exposure to the virus. Not all robots operate autonomously—many, in fact, require direct human supervision, and most are limited to simple, repetitive tasks. But robot makers say the experience they’ve gained during this trial-by-fire deployment will make their future machines smarter and more capable. These photos illustrate how robots are helping us fight this pandemic—and how they might be able to assist with the next one.

DROID TEAM

Photo: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters

A squad of robots serves as the first line of defense against person-to-person transmission at a medical center in Kigali, Rwanda. Patients walking into the facility get their temperature checked by the machines, which are equipped with thermal cameras atop their heads. Developed by UBTech Robotics, in China, the robots also use their distinctive appearance—they resemble characters out of a Star Wars movie—to get people’s attention and remind them to wash their hands and wear masks.

Photo: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters

SAY “AAH”
To speed up COVID-19 testing, a team of Danish doctors and engineers at the University of Southern Denmark and at Lifeline Robotics is developing a fully automated swab robot. It uses computer vision and machine learning to identify the perfect target spot inside the person’s throat; then a robotic arm with a long swab reaches in to collect the sample—all done with a swiftness and consistency that humans can’t match. In this photo, one of the creators, Esben Østergaard, puts his neck on the line to demonstrate that the robot is safe.

Photo: University of Southern Denmark

GERM ZAPPER
After six of its doctors became infected with the coronavirus, the Sassarese hospital in Sardinia, Italy, tightened its safety measures. It also brought in the robots. The machines, developed by UVD Robots, use lidar to navigate autonomously. Each bot carries an array of powerful short-wavelength ultraviolet-C lights that destroy the genetic material of viruses and other pathogens after a few minutes of exposure. Now there is a spike in demand for UV-disinfection robots as hospitals worldwide deploy them to sterilize intensive care units and operating theaters.

Photo: UVD Robots

RUNNING ERRANDS

In medical facilities, an ideal role for robots is taking over repetitive chores so that nurses and physicians can spend their time doing more important tasks. At Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital, in China, a robot called Aimbot drives down the hallways, enforcing face-mask and social-distancing rules and spraying disinfectant. At a hospital near Austin, Texas, a humanoid robot developed by Diligent Robotics fetches supplies and brings them to patients’ rooms. It repeats this task day and night, tirelessly, allowing the hospital staff to spend more time interacting with patients.

Photos, left: Diligent Robotics; Right: UBTech Robotics

THE DOCTOR IS IN
Nurses and doctors at Circolo Hospital in Varese, in northern Italy—the country’s hardest-hit region—use robots as their avatars, enabling them to check on their patients around the clock while minimizing exposure and conserving protective equipment. The robots, developed by Chinese firm Sanbot, are equipped with cameras and microphones and can also access patient data like blood oxygen levels. Telepresence robots, originally designed for offices, are becoming an invaluable tool for medical workers treating highly infectious diseases like COVID-19, reducing the risk that they’ll contract the pathogen they’re fighting against.

Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

HELP FROM ABOVE

Photo: Zipline

Authorities in several countries attempted to use drones to enforce lockdowns and social-distancing rules, but the effectiveness of such measures remains unclear. A better use of drones was for making deliveries. In the United States, startup Zipline deployed its fixed-wing autonomous aircraft to connect two medical facilities 17 kilometers apart. For the staff at the Huntersville Medical Center, in North Carolina, masks, gowns, and gloves literally fell from the skies. The hope is that drones like Zipline’s will one day be able to deliver other kinds of critical materials, transport test samples, and distribute drugs and vaccines.

Photos: Zipline

SPECIAL DELIVERY
It’s not quite a robot takeover, but the streets and sidewalks of dozens of cities around the world have seen a proliferation of hurrying wheeled machines. Delivery robots are now in high demand as online orders continue to skyrocket.

In Hamburg, the six-wheeled robots developed by Starship Technologies navigate using cameras, GPS, and radar to bring groceries to customers.

Photo: Christian Charisius/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

In Medellín, Colombia, a startup called Rappi deployed a fleet of robots, built by Kiwibot, to deliver takeout to people in lockdown.

Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP/Getty Images

China’s JD.com, one of the country’s largest e-commerce companies, is using 20 robots to transport goods in Changsha, Hunan province; each vehicle has 22 separate compartments, which customers unlock using face authentication.

Photos: TPG/Getty Images

LIFE THROUGH ROBOTS
Robots can’t replace real human interaction, of course, but they can help people feel more connected at a time when meetings and other social activities are mostly on hold.

In Ostend, Belgium, ZoraBots brought one of its waist-high robots, equipped with cameras, microphones, and a screen, to a nursing home, allowing residents like Jozef Gouwy to virtually communicate with loved ones despite a ban on in-person visits.

Photo: Yves Herman/Reuters

In Manila, nearly 200 high school students took turns “teleporting” into a tall wheeled robot, developed by the school’s robotics club, to walk on stage during their graduation ceremony.

Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

And while Japan’s Chiba Zoological Park was temporarily closed due to the pandemic, the zoo used an autonomous robotic vehicle called RakuRo, equipped with 360-degree cameras, to offer virtual tours to children quarantined at home.

Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

SENTRY ROBOTS
Offices, stores, and medical centers are adopting robots as enforcers of a new coronavirus code.

At Fortis Hospital in Bangalore, India, a robot called Mitra uses a thermal camera to perform a preliminary screening of patients.

Photo: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

In Tunisia, the police use a tanklike robot to patrol the streets of its capital city, Tunis, verifying that citizens have permission to go out during curfew hours.

Photo: Khaled Nasraoui/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

And in Singapore, the Bishan-Ang Moh Kio Park unleashed a Spot robot dog, developed by Boston Dynamics, to search for social-distancing violators. Spot won’t bark at them but will rather play a recorded message reminding park-goers to keep their distance.

Photo: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images

This article appears in the October 2020 print issue as “How Robots Became Essential Workers.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437598 Video Friday: Sarcos Is Developing a New ...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – [Online]
ROS World 2020 – November 12, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft unfurled its robotic arm Oct. 20, 2020, and in a first for the agency, briefly touched an asteroid to collect dust and pebbles from the surface for delivery to Earth in 2023.

[ NASA ]

New from David Zarrouk’s lab at BGU is AmphiSTAR, which Zarrouk describes as “a kind of a ground-water drone inspired by the cockroaches (sprawling) and by the Basilisk lizard (running over water). The robot hovers due to the collision of its propellers with the water (hydrodynamics not aerodynamics). The robot can crawl and swim at high and low speeds and smoothly transition between the two. It can reach 3.5 m/s on ground and 1.5m/s in water.”

AmphiSTAR will be presented at IROS, starting next week!

[ BGU ]

This is unfortunately not a great video of a video that was taken at a SoftBank Hawks baseball game in Japan last week, but it’s showing an Atlas robot doing an honestly kind of impressive dance routine to support the team.

ロボット応援団に人型ロボット『ATLAS』がアメリカからリモートで緊急参戦!!!
ホークスビジョンの映像をお楽しみ下さい♪#sbhawks #Pepper #spot pic.twitter.com/6aTYn8GGli
— 福岡ソフトバンクホークス(公式) (@HAWKS_official)
October 16, 2020

Editor’s Note: The tweet embed above is not working for some reason—see the video here.

[ SoftBank Hawks ]

Thanks Thomas!

Sarcos is working on a new robot, which looks to be the torso of their powered exoskeleton with the human relocated somewhere else.

[ Sarcos ]

The biggest holiday of the year, International Sloth Day, was on Tuesday! To celebrate, here’s Slothbot!

[ NSF ]

This is one of those simple-seeming tasks that are really difficult for robots.

I love self-resetting training environments.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

The Chiel lab collaborates with engineers at the Center for Biologically Inspired Robotics Research at Case Western Reserve University to design novel worm-like robots that have potential applications in search-and-rescue missions, endoscopic medicine, or other scenarios requiring navigation through narrow spaces.

[ Case Western ]

ANYbotics partnered with Losinger Marazzi to explore ANYmal’s potential of patrolling construction sites to identify and report safety issues. With such a complex environment, only a robot designed to navigate difficult terrain is able to bring digitalization to such a physically demanding industry.

[ ANYbotics ]

Happy 2018 Halloween from Clearpath Robotics!

[ Clearpath ]

Overcoming illumination variance is a critical factor in vision-based navigation. Existing methods tackled this radical illumination variance issue by proposing camera control or high dynamic range (HDR) image fusion. Despite these efforts, we have found that the vision-based approaches still suffer from overcoming darkness. This paper presents real-time image synthesizing from carefully controlled seed low dynamic range (LDR) image, to enable visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in an extremely dark environment (less than 10 lux).

[ KAIST ]

What can MoveIt do? Who knows! Let's find out!

[ MoveIt ]

Thanks Dave!

Here we pick a cube from a starting point, manipulate it within the hand, and then put it back. To explore the capabilities of the hand, no sensors were used in this demonstration. The RBO Hand 3 uses soft pneumatic actuators made of silicone. The softness imparts considerable robustness against variations in object pose and size. This lets us design manipulation funnels that work reliably without needing sensor feedback. We take advantage of this reliability to chain these funnels into more complex multi-step manipulation plans.

[ TU Berlin ]

If this was a real solar array, King Louie would have totally cleaned it. Mostly.

[ BYU ]

Autonomous exploration is a fundamental problem for various applications of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). Existing methods, however, were demonstrated to have low efficiency, due to the lack of optimality consideration, conservative motion plans and low decision frequencies. In this paper, we propose FUEL, a hierarchical framework that can support Fast UAV ExpLoration in complex unknown environments.

[ HKUST ]

Countless precise repetitions? This is the perfect task for a robot, thought researchers at the University of Liverpool in the Department of Chemistry, and without further ado they developed an automation solution that can carry out and monitor research tasks, making autonomous decisions about what to do next.

[ Kuka ]

This video shows a demonstration of central results of the SecondHands project. In the context of maintenance and repair tasks, in warehouse environments, the collaborative humanoid robot ARMAR-6 demonstrates a number of cognitive and sensorimotor abilities such as 1) recognition of the need of help based on speech, force, haptics and visual scene and action interpretation, 2) collaborative bimanual manipulation of large objects, 3) compliant mobile manipulation, 4) grasping known and unknown objects and tools, 5) human-robot interaction (object and tool handover) 6) natural dialog and 7) force predictive control.

[ SecondHands ]

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, Silicon Valley Robotics hosted a panel of Women in Robotics.

[ Robohub ]

As part of the upcoming virtual IROS conference, HEBI robotics is putting together a tutorial on robotics actuation. While I’m sure HEBI would like you to take a long look at their own actuators, we’ve been assured that no matter what kind of actuators you use, this tutorial will still be informative and useful.

[ YouTube ] via [ HEBI Robotics ]

Thanks Dave!

This week’s UMD Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar comes from Julie Shah at MIT, on “Enhancing Human Capability with Intelligent Machine Teammates.”

Every team has top performers- people who excel at working in a team to find the right solutions in complex, difficult situations. These top performers include nurses who run hospital floors, emergency response teams, air traffic controllers, and factory line supervisors. While they may outperform the most sophisticated optimization and scheduling algorithms, they cannot often tell us how they do it. Similarly, even when a machine can do the job better than most of us, it can’t explain how. In this talk I share recent work investigating effective ways to blend the unique decision-making strengths of humans and machines. I discuss the development of computational models that enable machines to efficiently infer the mental state of human teammates and thereby collaborate with people in richer, more flexible ways.

[ UMD ]

Matthew Piccoli gives a talk to the UPenn GRASP Lab on “Trading Complexities: Smart Motors and Dumb Vehicles.”

We will discuss my research journey through Penn making the world's smallest, simplest flying vehicles, and in parallel making the most complex brushless motors. What do they have in common? We'll touch on why the quadrotor went from an obscure type of helicopter to the current ubiquitous drone. Finally, we'll get into my life after Penn and what tools I'm creating to further drone and robot designs of the future.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots