New Cell-based Sensors Sniff Out Danger Like Bloodhounds

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080506151137.htm

ScienceDaily (May 7, 2008) — A small, unmanned vehicle makes its way down the road ahead of a military convoy. Suddenly it stops and relays a warning to the convoy commander. The presence of a deadly improvised explosive device, or IED, has been detected by sophisticated new sensor technology incorporating living olfactory cells on microchips mounted on the unmanned vehicle. The IED is safely dismantled and lives are saved.

This scenario may become a reality, thanks to the work of three faculty researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering who are collaborating across engineering disciplines to make advanced "cell-based sensors-on-a-chip" technology possible. Pamela Abshire, electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and Institute for Systems Research (ISR); Benjamin Shapiro, aerospace engineering and ISR; and Elisabeth Smela, mechanical engineering and ECE; are working on new sensors that take advantage of the sensory capabilities of biological cells.
These tiny sensors, only a few millimeters in size, could speed up and improve the detection of everything from explosive materials to biological pathogens to spoiled food or impure water.
Today's biochemical detectors are slow and produce an unacceptable number of false readings.
They are easily fooled because they often cannot distinguish subtle differences between deadly pathogens and harmless substances, and cannot fully monitor or interpret the different ways these substances interact with biological systems. To solve this problem, the Clark School researchers are learning how to incorporate real cells into tiny micro-systems to detect chemical and biological pathogens.
Different cells can be grown on these microchips, depending on the task at hand. Like a bloodhound hot on the trail of a scent, a chip containing a collection of olfactory cells plus sensing circuits that can interpret their behavior could detect the presence of explosives.
The researchers plan to use other specialized cells much like a canary in a coal mine. The cells would show stress or die when exposed to certain pathogens, and the sensing circuits monitoring them would trigger a warning -- more quickly and accurately than in present systems.
The researchers are tackling the many challenges that must be met for such chips to become a reality. Abshire, for example, is building circuits that can interact with the cells and transmit alerts about their condition. Shapiro and Smela are working on micro-fluidics technology to get the cells where they need to be on the chip, and to keep them alive and healthy once they're in position. Smela is also developing packages that incorporate the kind of wet, life-sustaining environments the biological components need, while keeping the sensitive electronic parts of the sensor dry.
Current research funding for the cell-based sensor technology comes from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Potential applications for their use extend well beyond national security, however.
For example, cell-based sensors could detect the presence of harmful bacteria in ground beef or spinach, or detect the local origin of specialty foods like cheeses or wines. In the pharmaceutical industry they could identify the most promising medicines in advance of animal and human trials, increasing cost-effectiveness and speed in developing new drugs. And they could speed up research in basic science. Imagine tiny biology labs, each one on a chip, in an array of thousands of chips that could fit in the palm of your hand.
Such arrays could advance biologists' fundamental understanding about the sense of smell or help doctors better see how the immune system works. They could be placed on fish as they swim in the ocean to monitor water quality, or set on a skyscraper's roof to evaluate air pollution.
"We bring the capability to monitor many different cells in parallel on these chips," explains Abshire. "You could say we're applying Moore's Law of exponentially increasing computer processing capability to cell biology."
The research won the University of Maryland's 2004 Invention of the Year Award in the physical science category. A patent application is on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Maryland, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Piecing Together The Next Generation Of Cognitive Robots

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080506120216.htm

ScienceDaily (May 6, 2008) — Building robots with anything akin to human intelligence remains a far off vision, but European researchers are making progress on piecing together a new generation of machines that are more aware of their environment and better able to interact with humans.

Making robots more responsive would allow them to be used in a greater variety of sophisticated tasks in the manufacturing and service sectors. Such robots could be used as home helpers and caregivers, for example.
As research into artificial cognitive systems (ACS) has progressed in recent years it has grown into a highly fragmented field. Some researchers and teams have concentrated on machine vision, others on spatial cognition, and on human-robot interaction, among many other disciplines.
All have made progress, but, as the EU-funded project CoSy (Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants) has shown, by working together the researchers can make even more advances in the field.
“We have brought together one of the broadest and most varied teams of researchers in this field,” says Geert-Jan Kruijff, the CoSy project manager at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence. “This has resulted in an ACS architecture that integrates multiple cognitive functions to create robots that are more self-aware, understand their environment and can better interact with humans.”
The CoSy ACS is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. It incorporates a range of technologies from a design for cognitive architecture, spatial cognition, human-robot interaction and situated dialogue processing, to developmental models of visual processing.
“We have learnt how to put the pieces of ACS together, rather than just studying them separately,” adds Jeremy Wyatt, one of the project managers at the UK’s University of Birmingham.
The researchers have made the ACS architecture toolkit they developed available under an open source license. They want to encourage further research. The toolkit has already sparked several spin-off initiatives.
Overcoming the integration challenge
“The integration of different components in an ACS is one of the greatest challenges in robotics,” Kruijff says. “Getting robots to understand their environment from visual inputs and to interact with humans from spoken commands and relate what is said to their environment is enormously complex.”
Because of the complexity most robots developed to date have tended to be reactive. They simply react to their environment rather than act in it autonomously. Similar to a beetle that scuttles away when prodded, many mobile robots back off when they collide with an object, but have little self-awareness or understanding of the space around them and what they can do there.
In comparison, a demonstrator called the Explorer developed by the CoSy team has a more human-like understanding of its environment. Explorer can even talk about its surroundings with a human.
Instead of using just geometric data to create a map of its surroundings, the Explorer also incorporates qualitative, topographical information. Through interaction with humans it can then learn to recognise objects, spaces and their uses. For example, if it sees a coffee machine it may reason that it is in a kitchen. If it sees a sofa it may conclude it is in a living room.
“The robot sees a room much as humans see it because it has a conceptual understanding of space,” Kruijff notes.
Another demonstrator, called the PlayMate, applied machine vision and spatial recognition in a different context. PlayMate uses a robotic arm to manipulate objects in response to human instructions.
In Wyatt’s view the development of machine vision and its integration with other ACS components is still a big obstacle to creating more advanced robots, especially if the goal is to replicate human sight and awareness.
“Don’t underestimate how sophisticated we are…,” he says. “We don’t realise how agile our brains are at interpreting what we see. You can pick out colours from a scene, look at a bottle of water, a packet of cornflakes, or a coffee mug and know what activities each of them allows. You recognise them, see where to grasp them, and how to manipulate them, and you do it all seamlessly. We are still so very, very far from doing that with robots.”
Robotic ‘gofers’
Fortunately, replicating human-like intelligence and awareness, if it is indeed possible, is not necessary when creating robots that are useful to humans.
Kruijff foresees robots akin to those developed in the CoSy project becoming an everyday sight over the coming years in what he describes as ‘gofer scenarios’. Already some robots with a lower level of intelligence are being used to bring medicines to patients in hospitals and could be used to transport documents around office buildings.
Robotic vacuum cleaners are becoming increasingly popular in homes, as too are toys that incorporate artificial intelligence. And the creation of robots that are able to interact with people opens the door to robotic home helpers and caregivers.
“In the future people may all be waited on by robots in their old age,” Wyatt says.
Adapted from materials provided by ICT Results.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

The rise of the emotional robot

Source: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19826506.100-the-rise-of-the-emotional-robot.html

Duke is careering noisily across a living room floor resplendent in the dark blue and white colours of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He's no student but a disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner called the Roomba. Not only have his owners dressed him up, they have also given him a name and gender.
Duke is not alone. Such behaviour is common, and takes myriad forms according to a survey of almost 400 Roomba owners, conducted late last year by Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter, who research human-computer interaction at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
"Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways," Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey (see Diagram) which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying "Our Baby", indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. "We just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery," she says.
Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. "People want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that's much more than a gadget," she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.
Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung's observations suggest that we have moved on. "I have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it," she says. "With skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect."
The Roomba, which is made by iRobot in Burlington, Massachusetts, isn't the only robot that people seem to bond with. US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by The Washington Post developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm's gripper to hold their rod.

Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it's the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. "Engineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones - and try to design robots that promote them," says Sung.
To work out which kinds of robots are more likely to coax social responses from humans, researchers led by Frank Heger at Bielefeld University in Germany are scanning the brains of people as they interact with robots. The team starts by getting humans to "meet" four different "opponents": a computer program running on a laptop, a pair of robotic lego arms that tap the keys of a laptop, a robot with a human-shaped body and rubbery human-like head, which also taps at a laptop, and a human. Then the volunteers don video goggles and enter an MRI machine. While inside the machine, a picture of the opponent they must play against flashes up inside their goggles.
The game, a modified version of the prisoner's dilemma, asks volunteers to choose between cooperating with their opponent or betraying them. As they can't tell what their opponent will do, it requires them to predict what their opponent is thinking. The volunteers indicate their choice from inside the scanner using a handset that controls their video display. The team carried out the experiment on 32 volunteers, who each played all four opponents. Then they compared the brain scans for each opponent, paying particular attention to the parts of the brain associated with assessing someone else's mental state, known as theory of mind. This ability is considered a vital part of successful social interactions.
Unsurprisingly, the team found that neurons associated with having a theory of mind were active to some extent when playing all opponents. However, they were more active the more human-like their opponent was, with the human triggering the most activity in this region, followed by the robot with the human-like body and head. The team says this shows that the way a robot looks affects the sophistication of an interaction.
Not surprisingly, though there are similarities between the way people view robots and other human beings, there are also differences. Daniel Levin and colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, showed people videos of robots in action and then interviewed them. He says that people are unwilling to attribute intentions to robots, no matter how sophisticated they appear to be.
Further complicating the matter, researchers have also shown that the degree to which someone socialises with and trusts a robot depends on their gender and nationality (See "Enter the gender-specific robot").
These uncertainties haven't stopped some researchers from forming strong opinions. Herbert Clark, a psychologist at Stanford University in California, is sceptical about humans ever having sophisticated relationships with robots. "Roboticists should admit that robots will never approach human-like interaction levels - and the sooner they do the sooner we'll get a realistic idea of what people can expect from robots." He says that robots' lack of desire and free will is always going to limit the way humans view them.
But Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University in Japan thinks that the sophistication of our interactions with robots will have few constraints. He has built a remote-controlled doppelgänger, which fidgets, blinks, breathes, talks, moves its eyes and looks eerily like him (New Scientist, 12 October 2006, p 42). Recently he has used it to hold classes at his university while he controls it remotely. He says that people's reactions to his doppelgänger suggest that they are engaging with the robot emotionally. "People treat my copy completely naturally and say hello to it as they walk past," he says. "Robots can be people's partners and they will be."

Enter the gender-specific robot
How people view robots may inform what future robots can do, but it seems that gender and nationality feed into our reaction, too.
Cognitive scientist Paul Schermerhorn and colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington asked 24 men and 23 women to cooperate with a machine-like robot on solving a mathematical problem and filling in a survey form. The robot consisted of a base with metre-high posts either side supporting a head with two cameras that looked like eyes. A voice synthesiser allowed it to speak. The team found that men thought of the robot as "more human-like" than women and engaged well with it at a social level, while women felt socially aloof and described it as "more machine-like".
However, the researchers say the difference in perception may be due to the way this particular robot interacted with the women - perhaps for some reason that robot appealed to men. They say that robots might need to acquire gender-specific behaviours to engage with humans. "People might prefer to interact with robots that exhibit characteristics of their gender, or of the opposite gender," says Schermerhorn. "This could lead to tailoring of the robot's characteristics to the [gender of the] human in future interactions."
Meanwhile, Vanessa Evers of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, together with researchers at Stanford University in California have found that US volunteers of European descent perceive robots differently to people raised in China who lived elsewhere for less than six years. They asked their volunteers how they would react in a hypothetical space emergency when a robot was on hand that might save them. It turned out that the US participants were more willing to trust the robot's decisions and were happier giving it control of the spacecraft than the Chinese participants. "This confirms that people from different national cultures may respond differently to robots," Evers says.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Robotic bugs set to invade the battlefield

Source:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/frontline/1924773/Robotic-bugs-set-to-invade-the-battlefield.html

A swarm of robotic insects is being developed for the military to hunt down enemy fighters in buildings and caves, carry mini bombs and identify chemical, nuclear or biological weapons.

Watch the video at:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1488655367/bctid1536203797

They look as though they have crawled from the set of a science fiction film, but the bugs are based on the design and size of real insects, including spiders and dragonflies.
They are to be fitted with cameras, as well as sensors to identify different types of weapon, and can be kitted out with a small payload of explosives.
The spider model is similar to that featured in the 2002 sci-fi film, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, in which robot insects are sent into a building by police to search for a suspect.
The robots are being developed for use by the American military and its allies, including the British Army, by BAE Systems.
Prototypes small enough to sit on a fingertip have already been created, including a fly that weighs less than an ounce and has a wingspan of 1.18in.
Lightweight carbon joints allow the robot to mimic precisely the movements of a real fly, with wings that beat 110 times a second.
Steve Scalera, programme manager for the project, said: "We’re trying to harness nature’s designs. Evolution has done a fabulous job of producing extremely efficient and capable systems.
"We’re building a collection of miniature robots that can explore complex terrain we wouldn’t normally be able to approach because it is too dangerous.
"This might mean exploring buildings or caves looking for people inside, searching for dangerous items like munitions, chemical, biological or nuclear substances that might be there."
The battery-powered insects will not be remotely-controlled by soldiers, but will be fitted with "artificial intelligence" software that lets them operate autonomously, and in teams.
Mr Scalera added: "We don't want to overburden soldiers on the battlefield. These devices can find their own way and work together in teams, much like groups of ants or bees do. But they work for the soldiers, feeding them information.
"At the soldier level, on the battlefield, we envisage these pieces of equipment to be ubiquitous. We want to actually put them in the hands of soldiers, who may have a pocketful of them.
"They can then use them at a moment’s notice, to provide additional awareness and to extend the soldier’s senses and reach, perhaps to look over a wall or search a building, before breaching it. They will enable us to do things that we currently just can’t do. They will save lives.”
The creators also envisage civilian uses for the insects, such as search-and-rescue operations, following building or mine collapses.
The Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (Mast) project is being led by BAE Systems and involves scientists at universities across America.
It has been funded by a £19 million grant to BAE by the US Army Research Laboratory for use by America and Britain. Dr Joseph Mait, of the laboratory, said: "Robotic platforms provide operational capabilities that would otherwise be costly, impossible, or deadly to achieve."
Prof Ismet Gursul, who has been studying insect flight for use in robotics at the University of Bath, said: "This might seem like science fiction, but it is a process of natural evolution for robots. "Engineers are making robots smaller and smaller, because it saves on costs and allows you to make more."

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Prepping Robots to Perform Surgery

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04moll.html?hp

By BARNABY J. FEDER
Published: May 4, 2008

WHAT do you call a surgeon who operates without scalpels, stitching tools or a powerful headlamp to light the patient’s insides? A better doctor, according to a growing number of surgeons who prefer to hand over much of the blood-and-guts portion of their work to medical robots controlled from computer consoles.
Many urologists performing prostate surgery view the precise, tremor-free movements of a robot as the best way to spare nerves crucial to bladder control and sexual potency. A robot’s ability to deftly handle small tools may lead to a less invasive procedure and faster recovery for a patient. Robots also can protect surgeons from physical stress and exposure to X-rays that may force them into premature retirement.
A generation ago, the debate in medicine was whether robotics would ever play a role. Today, robots are a fast-growing, diversifying $1 billion segment of the medical device industry. And Wall Street has just two questions for the industry: How far is this going, and how fast?
There are no simple answers, of course, but it is remarkable how often Frederic H. Moll comes up in any discussion.
Dr. Moll, 56, is a soft-spoken man who can look uncomfortable on stage. Yet his role in founding Intuitive Surgical, the company that now dominates the field, and his current involvement with three other robotics companies, has kept him in the sights of investors, health care providers and fellow entrepreneurs.
He’s now best known as chief executive of Hansen Medical, a publicly traded robotics company focused on minimally invasive cardiac care. But he’s also an investor in and a board member of Mako Surgical, an orthopedics robotics company that recently went public, and he is a co-founder and chairman of Restoration Robotics, a start-up company focused on cosmetic surgery.
“Anyone who meets Fred will remember him,” says Maurice R. Ferré, the chief executive of Mako, which makes a drill that shuts off if a knee surgeon starts removing too much bone. “He will cut you off to ask technical questions and drives right to what’s important. A lot of people are looking at the Mako story because Fred’s involved.”
Despite Wall Street’s growing fondness for medical robotics companies, plenty of health care providers and insurers are cautious. They’re looking for more evidence that robotics improves outcomes for patients at a cost hospitals can absorb. Many still wonder whether it is more about marketing than medical progress.
Winifred Hayes, chief executive of Hayes Inc., a health care technology consulting firm in Lansdale, Pa., says that most clinical data doesn’t support contentions that patients fare better with robotic surgery. Most hospitals and clinics are losing money or making poor returns on their robots, she says.
“The real story is that this is a technology that has been disseminated fairly widely prematurely,” she says.
Even so, interest in robotics remains strong, and the arc of Dr. Moll’s own career has landed him at the intersection of tussles between business and medicine.
His parents were both pediatricians, and he sailed through medical school. But during his surgical residency at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle in the early 1980s, he found the ailments of patients less compelling than the shortcomings of the tools that surgeons used to treat them.
“I was struck by the size of the incision and injury created just to get inside the body,” Dr. Moll says. “It felt antiquated.”
So he obtained a leave of absence to study whether the long slender cutting tools he had seen gynecologists use in sterilization surgery on women could be adapted to gall bladder removal.
“We saved the spot for 10 years, but he never came back,” said Dr. John A. Ryan Jr., then head of the surgical training at Virginia Mason.
Indeed, Dr. Moll had left Seattle for Silicon Valley, where he spent the next decade creating and selling two medical equipment businesses while getting a graduate degree in management at Stanford. He walked away from the two deals with about $7.5 million. That was modest by the standards of, say, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, the Microsoft founders who were his schoolmates at the exclusive Lakeside School in Seattle in the early 1970s, but Dr. Moll had found his calling.
He says his immersion in the entrepreneurial life cost him his marriage; he remembers once telling his wife he was so busy he couldn’t talk to her for a month. But it also set him on a course to become a pioneer in the emerging field of medical robotics.
ROBOTS revolutionized manufacturing during the 1980s, on the back of advances in computing, motion controls and software design.

Visionaries like Dr. Richard M. Satava, who oversaw federally funded medical robotics research at the time, predicted that robots would eventually be able to operate as precisely as the world’s greatest surgeons and far more tirelessly, perhaps even in remote locations, through satellite links.
A project that Dr. Satava’s group financed to build a remotely controlled medical robot for the battlefield caught Dr. Moll’s eye in 1994.
Dr. Moll saw scant commercial potential for long-distance surgery, but he became convinced that the technology, being developed by SRI International, a nonprofit contract research firm in Palo Alto, Calif., could be adapted to make routine surgery much less invasive in the hands of civilian surgeons.
He took the idea to his employer, Guidant, a medical device company. Guidant decided that robotic surgery was too futuristic and too risky, so Dr. Moll rounded up backers, resigned, and in 1995, founded Intuitive Surgical.
A competitor, Computer Motion, had a head start using technology developed for the space program. But Intuitive Surgical had an experienced management team headed by Lonnie M. Smith. Mr. Smith was recruited from Hillenbrand Industries, where he oversaw health care companies, to become chief executive in 1997, leaving Dr. Moll to concentrate on strategic development.
Intuitive went public in 2000 at $9 a share. (Dr. Moll’s stake at the time was worth roughly $13.5 million, and he still owns a significant number of shares.) In 2003, it acquired Computer Motion, eliminating both patent wars and the competing design. Since then, soaring sales and profits have laid to rest any Wall Street doubts that robots could be commercially successful.
The company earned $144.5 million last year on sales of $600.8 million. Based on first-quarter results that were better than expected, Intuitive forecasts that sales will grow 42 percent this year, to $853.2 million. Its stock, which traded at $42.42 three years ago, closed Friday at $290.03 a share.
The company prospered by proving that robots could deftly handle rigid surgical tools like scalpels and sewing needles through small incisions in a patient’s skin. In prostate surgery, it is rapidly becoming unusual for a urologist to operate without using one of Intuitive’s da Vinci robots, which sell for $1.3 million, on average. Each also generates hundreds of thousands of dollars more in annual revenue from service contracts and attachments that must be replaced after each procedure. Intuitive is now marketing the da Vinci to other specialists, including gynecologists and heart surgeons.
Intuitive’s success has not put to rest questions about how many hospitals and clinics can afford robots. The da Vinci and the CyberKnife, a precision radiation robot from Accuray to treat tumors, are featured in hospital ads to attract patients, but it is hard for hospitals to get extra reimbursement from insurers for using them.
However, hospitals that have been leaders in adopting robotic technology say they are content to just break even for now, because the investment is partly about attracting surgeons who want to be leaders in research and training.
“If you are looking at the future, it’s hard to envision a hospital not offering robotics,” said Robert Glenning, chief financial officer at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, which has bought five da Vinci’s and has a sixth on loan from Intuitive Surgical that is used to train visiting doctors.
DR. MOLL left Intuitive in 2002 to pursue a more ambitious concept at Hansen Medical: robots that manipulate the tips of thin, flexible catheters that doctors insert deep in the heart. If he succeeds, the Sensei robotic systems from Hansen, costing about $675,000, may become the go-to tools for treating many circulatory problems.
Relations between the two companies were rocky in the first year because of disagreements over the breadth of Intuitive’s patents. Eventually, the two signed an intellectual property agreement that gives Intuitive a 3 percent royalty on Hansen sales. With Intuitive expanding into cardiac care, the two may eventually collide in some procedures.
Doctors who use catheters generally gain access to the circulatory system through a small incision in the major veins that run through the thigh or arm. Both the makers of rigid tools and the catheter companies are competing in another fast-developing field of “scarless” therapy involving operations performed through the urinary tract and other natural openings.

Dr. Moll is betting that flexible tools like those that work with the Sensei will dominate as this movement matures. He took a team of four Hansen employees to India last summer for a series of surgeries testing whether kidney stones could be removed by using a robotic catheter. Dr. Inderbir S. Gill, a urologist from the Cleveland Clinic who led the research, said that Dr. Moll had followed every case for four days.
“He was at the console like a mother hen even though he wasn’t allowed to touch it,” said Dr. Gill, who received stock in Hansen for work on the research and is planning a clinical trial.
Like Intuitive in its early days, Hansen faces a competitor that got an earlier start. Stereotaxis, based in St. Louis, makes the Niobe, a robot that generates magnetic fields around the patient. By manipulating the magnetic field from Niobe’s computer, doctors can manage the movements inside the patient of its customized magnetic catheters.
The Sensei manipulates a Hansen catheter called Artisan, a hollow sheath through which doctors can deploy smaller catheters. Sensei and Artisan were approved by federal regulators last May for use with catheters that map electrical activity in the heart. While mapping is currently the only job for which Hansen can actively market the Sensei, the robot’s real focus is to combine mapping with minimally invasive treatments to halt electrical short circuits in the heart that cause it to beat abnormally.
Fans include Dr. Davendra Mehta, chief arrhythmia specialist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, who last fall became the first doctor in New York City to order a Sensei. “This is like power steering versus conventional steering,” said Dr. Mehta during a recent procedure.
Using the robot also lets Dr. Mehta avoid spending up to five hours a day wearing a lead vest to limit his exposure to the X-rays when monitoring the catheter’s location in a patient.
THE potential appeal of the Sensei may be obvious. But with just 23 systems installed at the end of March, the competition from Stereotaxis and doubts among many health care providers about whether robots are worth the expense, Dr. Moll has plenty of obstacles ahead.
Still, he and his team members took Hansen public in November 2006, and received approval from regulators in Europe and the United States to market the Sensei. In April, Hansen raised $39.4 million in a secondary stock offering despite Wall Street’s gloomy outlook on the economy. Hansen also has an agreement with St. Jude Medical, the heart device company that is a leader in 3-D heart mapping systems, for co-marketing of technologies.
Dr. Moll said Hansen, based in Mountain View, Calif., should become profitable by the end of next year, two and a half years sooner than Intuitive crossed that threshold. Hansen’s volatile stock, which hit a peak of $39.32 in October before tumbling to $13.48 in March, now trades at $18.54 a share after the company reported better-than-expected first-quarter results on Thursday. Hansen sold eight new robots in the quarter, producing revenue of $6.2 million, and operating losses narrowed.
Even while juggling all of this, Dr. Moll is serving as chairman of Restoration Robotics, a start-up he has financed that aims to apply robotics to hair replacement surgeries for bald men.
Dr. Moll says robotics will ultimately advance on still other fronts, largely because it can help doctors of varying ability perform at the level of the world’s top surgeons.
“The public has no idea of the extent of difference between top surgeons and bad ones,” he said. “Robots are good at going where they are supposed to, remembering where they are and stopping when required.”

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Nanotechnology Produces New Electronic Materials

Source:

http://pcdandf.com/cms/content/view/4649/95/

Written by Philip Buonpastore
Friday, 02 May 2008

STONEY BROOK, NY - The nanotechnology of engineering atomic layer interfaces to produce desired properties, called “improper ferroelectricity” reportedly holds promise for a technological revolution that may compare to the development of modern electronics.
According to an article in the April 10th issue of Nature, a new artificial material is has been created that may mark the beginning of a revolution in the development of materials for electronic applications.
The new material, called a superlattice, which has a layered structure composed of alternating atomically thin layers of two different oxides (PbTiO3 and SrTiO3) takes on properties radically different than either of the two materials by themselves. According to the article, these properties are a direct consequence of the artificially layered atomic structure, and the interactions at the atomic level interface between the layers.
As stated in the article, Ferroelectrics are useful functional materials, with applications ranging from non-volatile computer memories, to micro-electromechanical machines or infrared detectors. “Improper ferroelectricity” is a kind of property that occurs only rarely in natural materials, with effects that are typically too small to be useful. This new superlattice material shows improper ferroelectricity (a property in neither of the original oxides) at a magnitude around 100 times greater than any naturally occurring improper ferroelectric, creating options for many more real world applications.
According to on of the material’s researcher, Dr. Matthew Dawber, “Besides the immediate applications that could be generated by this nanomaterial, this discovery opens a completely new field of investigation and the possibility of new functional materials based on…interface engineering on the atomic scale.”
Transition metal oxides are a class of materials that provoke great interest because of the great range of functional properties that they can present (dielectrics, ferroelectrics, piezoelectrics, magnets or superconductors) and the possibilities for integration into numerous devices. The majority of these oxides have a similar structure (referred to as ‘perovskite’) and recently, researchers have developed the ability to build these materials atomic layer by layer, to attempt to produce new materials with exceptional properties.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Ready for the Robot Revolution

Source:

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/must-read/62856.html?welcome=1209887867

By Pam Baker TechNewsWorld

Part of the ECT News Network 05/03/08 4:00 AM PT

Compared with the agile, intelligent robots envisioned in science fiction, today's real-life robots may seem relatively unimpressive. But advances in robotics are indeed being made, and the results don't necessarily manifest themselves in humanoid automatons that can dance and shake hands. Often, the technology finds other practical applications.

Despite some impressive showings in robotics lately, the accolades are slow to come from industry outsiders. We, the general public, watch Honda's Asimo slowly make its way down a few steps, for example, and unfairly compare it to the glib and golden C-3PO of science fiction, and thus blind ourselves to the miracle before us.
But it's not just Asimo that suffers from this prejudice; it's all of them walking, scrambling or rolling on the planet today.
In that misguided and erroneous judgment of all real robots , there is "Danger, Will Robinson," as the Model B-9 Environmental Control Robot in "Lost in Space" would say. For ignorance and diminished enthusiasm leads to lack of funding, derailed projects, slowed progress, and fewer minds focused on bringing sci-fi technology to life.
Fortunately, the industry has not been deterred. Once the blinders come off, you see robotics at work everywhere.

Don't Miss the Revolution

"If you are looking for robots, you might miss the robotic revolution," Matt Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, told TechNewsWorld.
He says a robot is a bunch of technologies all packed together in one human- or animal-sized bundle. But in most cases there is no reason to cram the technologies into such a tight bundle. So even though you don't see it, robotics technologies are having a significant impact already, and that impact is growing.
For example, computer vision technology is being deployed in cameras for improved auto-focus and red eye correction. It's also deployed on the Web to assist in image database searches. Robotics technologies are used in computer games , to produce computer generated animation for movies, and even to provide real-time enhancement of televised sporting events.

Serendipitous Design

Where did these robotic enhancements come from? "These are useful by-products we discover along the way," Oussama Khatib, professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, told TechNewsWorld. Khatib heads a research group at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and is part of Honda's Humanoid Robot Project. He is also the father of the famous earlier robots: Romeo and Juliet.
"We are making progress on building a humanoid robot, but we don't need to completely build one before we can apply what we have learned to other disciplines," explained Khatib.
From enhanced medical tools and procedures to energy-saving appliances and smart security systems, robotics is pushing advancements overall at a speedier pace.
"There is still a long way to go before we see robots that can perform at a level that Hollywood presents, but things are moving ahead enough that there is value emerging," Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Robotics Group, told TechNewsWorld.
"Techniques like vision recognition that 10 years ago were black arts are popping up all over the place. What would likely cost you thousands of dollars in the past might even be free today," he added.

Better Living Through Robots

Beyond the invisible but useful robotics that power much of our mundane world, the quest for a perfect robot to aid in an uncertain future is under way in earnest.
In Japan, for example, a think tank is predicting that robots will start to fill the jobs of humans as the population there ages and shrinks. The U.S. is facing a similar population problem, as are a number of other well-developed countries.
"In the U.S. alone, 40 million people are over the age of 65, and over 90 percent of them wish to remain living independently. However, we all know that as we age, our physical and cognitive capabilities tend to decline. Robots could be important way to deal with this by acting as active agents that help make up for any diminished abilities we have," said Trower.
When industry insiders speak of robots filling jobs, they are not referring to the industrial robots we have now that deliver repetitive and automated services. They are referring to robots that can replace humans in far more complex tasks.
"Robots can remind us to take our medication. Robots can carry things for us. Robots can keep us better connected with our families and caregivers. Robots can even entertain us," said Trower. "And the cost of the robots to do this will be far cheaper than human assisted care."
The Robots of Japan
Japan in particular has a reason to rush robot development, which is why we see so many efforts coming from there. "With declines in birth rates, overall the average age is increasing at an unprecedented rate, and it is proceeding most rapidly in Japan," said Trower.
"There is great concern about how to deal with the loss out of the workforce as well as how to care for an ever increasing population of senior citizens. Robots are seen as way to bridge the gap," he explained.
The elderly stand to gain a great deal in quality of life issues. "Intelligent homes can provide support to the elderly, allowing us to lead independent lives much longer than we do now," explained Mason.
That support can range from carrying the groceries and putting them away to cleaning the house, aiding in dressing, providing immediate CPR and summoning medical assistance if needed. The possibilities are endless, making the robotic creations in the movie "I, Robot" a lot less far-fetched.

Humanoid, Insectoid, Robotoid

However, the ultimate design of these synthetic helpers is still a bit up for grabs.
Many have noted that the Japanese tend to design robots that look human while Westerners tend to build robots that look more like insects or animals. What's up with that?
"This may be partly cultural. The Japanese have always considered robots as positive human assistants. Astro Boy has been one of the earliest, most popular characterizations," explained Trower. "Perhaps it also has something to do with Asian culture being more attuned with nature, whereas in Western cultures we have been dominated by the scientific method, which tends to separate the rational from the emotional or social aspects of perception."
Others in the industry think the East vs. West perception of robots is totally off the mark from the start.
"Most of our robots are neither humanoid nor insectoid," laughed Mason. "In fact, they don't look like robots at all. Perhaps we should say they are not even robotoid."
He cites, for example, Boss, the Carnegie Mellon robot that recently won the Urban Challenge that looks like a car. "Probably when we have developed homes with embedded robotic technology, they will still look like homes," he said.
Challenges Ahead
The challenges ahead are difficult, but multi-disciplined teams are chiseling away at them every day.
"The current robots are platforms to study, but they are not yet safe for human interaction," explained Khatib. "We are also making progress in sensing and perceiving the environment, but it is difficult. The environment in industry is structured, but the environment around humans is messy. There is still a ways to go."
Khatib said the major challenges are in integration, decreasing the robot's weight, making a more sensitive skin for better environment perception, and in solving the human safety issue.
"A major stumbling block is to build systems that are safe and soft enough to interact with people, and also cheap enough for people to afford," agreed Mason.
In the end, the perfect robot will become commonplace and as unappreciated as the desktop PC.
"Robots are a natural evolution of PC technology, just enabled to interact and support us in a greater diversity of ways," said Trower. "They will help us live safer and more comfortable lives and will come in many forms, from smarter cars to smarter appliances.
"We may not even think of all of them as robots at all," he said. At least that much will stay the same.

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