robots.net – Robots Podcast #106: Swiss Robotics

Posted on June 20, 2012 by admin

In this episode Robots Podcast talks with Dario Floreano about his new role as director of the Swiss National Center of Competence for Research (NCCR) in Robotics which brings together leading experts in the field working at Swiss institutions, including EPFL, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA). NCCR Robotics was launched in December 2010 and will run for up to twelve years. The center aims to develop human-oriented robots that assist people in their daily lives and improve their quality of life.

See the rest here: robots.net – Robots Podcast #106: Swiss Robotics

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Bio-Robotics: Biology Goes High-Tech | KQED QUEST

Posted on June 20, 2012 by admin

Meet robo-squirrel. New technology in the emerging field of bio-robotics is helping biologists learn more about animal behavior.

The Bay Area may be the high-tech capital of the nation, but increasingly, biologists working at some of the area’s universities are turning to technology, too. The game-changing field of “bio-robotics” is opening a new window onto animal behavior.

That can be seen in the hills high above San Jose, where there’s a timeless battle going on between predator and prey – California ground squirrels and Northern Pacific rattlesnakes.

Rulon Clark, a biologist at San Diego State University, is studying this unique interaction at the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve. As he shows me the field site, he warns me that the grassy hills are chock full of rattlesnakes. “Just try to watch where you’re stepping,” he says.

Read more from the original source: Bio-Robotics: Biology Goes High-Tech | KQED QUEST

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Springdale Plays Host to Robotics Competition – KFSM 5 – Fort Smith

Posted on June 20, 2012 by admin

Students from across the country put their engineering skills to the test Saturday at a robotics competition at Springdale High School.The basketball-inspire competition is called the 2012 Rebound Rumble Game.

Students spent countless hours over a period of four months designing, programming and building robots that can shoot hoops and rebound balls. The competition is played between teams that try to score the most points by making baskets.

Although the Arkansas First Robotics Competition is in its off-season, the event in Springdale still brought out plenty of top competitors, including current world champion, the Baxter Bomb Squad.

You can watch the competition live today now 06.20.12

Original post: Springdale Plays Host to Robotics Competition – KFSM 5 – Fort Smith

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Using nature to inspire robotics | Harvard Gazette

Posted on June 19, 2012 by admin

The annual symposium of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, held at Harvard Medical School, prompted a spirited discussion on robotics and medicine, with nature as a model.

Scientists looking to nature for inspiration in solving humanity’s problems gathered at Harvard Medical School(HMS) on Friday to learn how robotics is helping to improve medical care.

Participants in the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering’s annual symposium, called “Noise and Rhythm: Harnessing Complexity in Medicine and Robotics,” heard about how advances in the field are improving artificial limbs, about how other devices are teaching injured people to walk, about manufacturing and control of small flying robots, and about advances in “swarm intelligence” controlling bunches of machines.

Wyss Director Donald Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at HMS and professor of bioengineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, introduced the daylong event, which took place at HMS’s New Research Building.

Ingber said the Wyss has come a long way in the three-and-a-half years since it began, and today has 300 full-time staff members, 100,000 square feet of space, 180 patents, 20 to 25 industry collaborations, and two clinical trials about to begin.

Three speakers in the morning addressed the complexity of nature’s rhythms, highlighting research that explored irregularities in heartbeat, in nerve signaling, and in babies’ breathing while asleep. Ary Goldberger, a core faculty member at the Wyss and professor of medicine at HMS and at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said that the traditional view of medicine has been that health is a steady state disrupted by illness. Once the illness is overcome, the body returns to its normal state. The more researchers learn, however, the more they understand that health is not a simple steady state, but is complex and dynamic, which is an important lesson in understanding robotic design.

Michael Goldfarb, Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Intelligent Mechatronics, described a new, powered, artificial leg that improves on current models that function passively. Passive prosthetics are hinged at the knee and work using the movement of a wearer’s upper leg to swing the lower leg into place

See the original post here: Using nature to inspire robotics | Harvard Gazette

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WHAT IS MEDICAL ROBOTICS?

Posted on May 28, 2012 by admin

Would you let your doctor turn a bacteria sized robot loose inside your body? The time is coming for you to decide. Medical innovation using robot machines is not science fiction anymore.

What is medical robotics today? It is an increasingly used key to health. Stop me if you heard about this already. Just in case you were a bit busy and missed it last week, they invented a smaller micro robot than the Da Vinci micro robot and they are using it for abdominal surgery.It also could be a new product waiting for marketing, management and investment. What is that? You say that you were not aware of the micro robot known as Da Vinci that does a wide variety of surgical procedures without the level of invasiveness routinely involved in surgeries done by the human hand. Well I don’t know how you missed that one. The Da Vinci robot surgeon has been around for a while now. Here is a picture of it. It has been widely used for prostratectomies, cardiac valve repair and gynecological procedures.

Sure it looks friendly enough as medical equipment goes these days but don’t let its cuddly features fool you. It is all business. . It is controlled by a doctor from a console and it gives the physician pin point accuracy in executing the micro fine movements so important when one is doing things inside of a micro environment like the human body. But the Da Vinci is not the first robot ever used in the surgical theater. The first surgical robot was called Puma and it came on the scene in 1985. Here is a picture of Puma.

Looks a bit scarier than the Da Vinci right, but it was a nicer surgery than the human kind because it allows a doctor to get inside the body without having to make more than a couple of incisions. Less incisions, means far less healing and pain suffered..

Now back to the health benefits of the Sprint micro robot for abdominal surgery. It smaller than Da Vinci and it makes this kind of surgery less complicated, invasive and costly. Also because there is only one incision, it can go in at the naval which is itself a natural scar so the incision scar blends in. It has tiny arms and elbows and even tiny little mechanical shoulders.This wonder is the invention and development project of Prof Menciassi and a team of researchers from across Europe called the Araknes team. Their work was supported by EUR 8.1 million in funding from the European Commission.

A robot called RIVA, developed by Intelligent Hospital Systems, has likewise automated the preparation of IV solutions in hospital pharmacies, making the process safer, cheaper and more efficient. To read more about Robotic Syringe robot click the link

One more thing about robots in general.They are being used more and more from everything to diagnosing symptoms or keeping supplies in the hospital. They deliver medicine to nurses stations, deliver medicine to the filling of prescriptions and now they will deliver medicine right to the cell inside your body.This will mean les medicine is used and less toxicity to other collateral areas of the body.

The following is based on a paper from; The 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems October 11-15, 2009 St. Louis, USA. The people pioneering this work who are the authors of this paper are; Li Zhang, Jake J. Abbott, Lixin Dong, Bradley E. Kratochvil, Haixin Zhang, Kathrin E. Peyer, and Bradley J. Nelson

This is one of the first places it was published and it is the basis of ongoing research which was updated in 2011.

Different materials are candidates for helical including semiconductors, metals, and polymers

The idea is a robot so small that it is larger but still in the ballpark of the bacterial level. They call them Anti Bacterial Flagella or ABF for short. They do not actually go after bacteria yet but they are designed to deliver medicine to the correct cell by making an incision and then injecting the medicine. The flagella name came about because of a discovery In 1973. It was observed that bacteria swim in liquid by rotating their flagella filaments in a bundle.The helical shape allows for optimum passage through our liquid bodies. It took a while to get this because propulsion at the micro level is somewhat different from propulsion at the macro level and requires different types of mechanisms for application. The art of invention was influenced by observing nature once again.

How is the ABF guided to its destination? It is guided electromagnetically to its target. the soft metal head is composed of a Cr/Ni/Au trilayer with a thickness of 10/180/10 nm,respectively.

Because of the metal head it can be guided to the spot electromagnetically. The ABS will be used to manipulate mater at the cellular and sub cellular level.

We are awaiting the test of putting one of these in a human for medical treatment.We will keep you posted as science marches on.

Artificial Intellegence Patent

Posted on May 25, 2012 by admin

Inventors:

Yang, Jiang-ming (Beijing, CN) Cai, Rui (Beijing, CN) Wang, Xin-jing (Beijing, CN) Zhang, Lei (Beijing, CN) under the auspices of Microsoft Corporation were awarded patent rights for an artificial intelligence process.

The Basis of the Patent

Here is a patent you can read about on our Artificial Intelligence RSS feed. Date May 22 titled “Modeling semantic and structure of threaded discussions”. How will this software affect our social lifestyle?

This is intelligence computer software for the management and automation of DATA logic streams. It is designesd to increase logic streams to develop the art of discussion closer to the level of the fact of the word and begin interpreting automate dicisions on the possible meaning word, given the context in which itthe word is found in the discussion threads.

The patent was awarded on May 22, 2012 and was applied for, almost 3 years ago. It seems they are a bit backed up over there in the US Office of Patents and Trademarks. This patent will help bloggers, forum and discussion group moderators and is based on models consisting of semantic terms and structural terms. It will help in organizing posts on forums, finding the experts on a subject for good information sorting and identify junk mail and spin content that tries to appear on blogs and forums these days.

The patent comes under the heading of artificial intelligence because this modeling system makes decisions and constructs organized ideas in the form dialogue output based on dialogue input.

If you are looking for the origins of Robby, Terminator the Jetsons or Futurama or even HAL from 2001 type robots, then look no further. It is verbal logic systems like the one patented this week that will be the cyborgs of tomorrow.

Here is a discussion of experts model example used in the Patent application.

This is the kind of discussion that a robot would understand as easily as a programmer discussing topics online.

Very tidy piece of organization. And presumably the junk posts have been dispensed with as well. This next figure contained in the patent give a hint of the formula used for that function.

Assigning numeric probability values to semantic and structural terms to come up with the likelihood of a bogus comment.

By this method it would in principle be possible to construct laws and ordinances. By creating a discussion framework to solve a certain problem. Then sorting through the comments, discovering who were the experts in the discussion and who were just letting off steam. You could have a political module, a logistics module an engineering module, behavior statistics module and run the comments through them and set up the elements in the law that would give it highest probability to pass legislation.

This patent has been pending for almost 3 years now and so has probably been in use since then. That means it may already be outdated. Who knows what they are actually implementing now in the artificial intelligence world.

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