Yesterday, I got a kidney stone. I would describe what it feels like to get a kidney stone, but I’m not sure that words can do it justice. If you’ve had a kidney stone before, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, be thankful. The only reason that it’s something to look forward to is so that you’ll be able to contrast it with every other pain you’ll ever experience and think, “well, this may be bad, but at least it’s not a kidney stone.”

The first thing I did after the massive (massive) amount of narcotics wore off was to check and see whether I could somehow replace my real kidneys with robotic ones that won’t have this problem. Happily, the answer is “soon.” Ten teams of researchers headed by a group at UCSF have developed an artificial kidney that works just about as well as the real, biological thing. An artificial hemofilter screens toxins, while bioengineered renal tube cells provide other vital functions of a healthy kidney. Your blood pressure keeps the whole thing running without needing batteries or a pump. Besides not being susceptible to kidney stones, the artificial kidney will help save billions of dollars and thousands of lives for people who depend on dialysis.

The researchers already have a proven, working prototype… Problem is, it’s currently the size of a small room, which makes it a bit of a challenge to implant in most people. Using currently existing technology, however, the device should be able to shrink down to about the size of a coffee cup, and clinical trials should start in 5-7 years.

VIA [ Science Daily ]

Cody here comes from Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Lab; we first met him back in March. Since then, Cody’s been busy, learning how to give sponge baths. All an operator has to do is to select an area of a patient, and Cody will autonomously go to work. In the video above, there are little blue squares of debris that Cody has been assigned to clean up, and clearly, he’s pretty good at it. Very good. He goes nice and sloooowww. Yeah… Just like that.

Cody’s more than just a pleasurebot, though. He’s learning how to help out in hospitals and care facilities, to reduce the workload on nurses and direct care workers. This means better healthcare for everyone in the long run, and we can all look forward to getting sponged down by robots. I know I am.

[ Georgia Tech Healthcare Robotics ]

The woman in this picture is Amanda Boxtel, who has had a T11/12 spinal injury for 18 years. She’s a paraplegic, but she’s now able to walk with the aid of eLEGS, a robotic exoskeleton system from Berkeley Bionics. You probably remember Berkeley Bionics from their cargo-carrying exoskeleton, HULC, which they’ve since licensed to Lockheed Martin for production for the military. eLEGS is largely based on HULC, except designed for (eventual) home use. The system is relatively light at 45 pounds, and you strap into it by yourself while sitting down. After only a few hours of practice, paraplegics are able to use eLEGS to stand up and walk:

More, after the jump.

eLEGS is very efficient, and allows for an entire day of walking without needing to be recharged. It’s also extremely quiet, which is very important for a device that is designed to allow you to move around and interact with people in public and social situations.

I made a point of asking how exactly the interface between the user and the system works, and was told that it was proprietary, “but nice try.” In general, however, it appears as though eLEGS senses arm movements through ‘smart crutches’ (it also looks like there’s some kind of sensor attached to each upper arm), and as the user moves one crutch forward, eLEGS moves the opposite leg. However, to some extent eLEGS learns and adapts to each user, so there must be some other stuff going on under the hood.

eLEGS will be available next July to a select group of rehab centers, but from the beginning, eLEGS was designed for people to take home and use by themselves. By 2013, eLEGS should be available for purchase for something in the low six figures, although the eventual target price is something in the neighborhood of $50k, which is equivalent to a top of the line wheelchair.

I especially liked what Amanda says at the end of the video:

“This is not a wave of the future. The eLEGS is right now. I don’t have to be hopeful… This is reality.”

It’s pretty awesome to realize how true that is.

[ Berkeley Bionics ]

Looks like Fujitsu’s getting into the cuddly companion robot market with this robot teddy bear, who can laugh, wave, and won’t ever judge you. With 12 actuators the bear can perform some 300 actions, and with touch, grip, and tilt sensors, it’s reasonably interactive. Fujitsu seems to want this robot to serve the same general function as Paro: it’s got enough interactivity to promote emotional bonds, and (most importantly) is fuzzy and snugglable, making a good choice for a companion robot.

If this robot looks a little bit familiar, it’s because we’ve seen something just like it before… MIT’s ‘Huggable’ robot, from back in 2008. Both robots have generally similar capabilities, except that the MIT bear is more geared toward interactive telepresence while the Fujitsu bear seems to be more of an autonomous companion. Not much seems to have come of Huggable recently, though, so for the moment, Fujitsu has the monopoly on robot bears. Non-violent ones, at least.

VIA [ Engadget ]

This hair washing robot from Panasonic made the rounds last week, but I figured it was one of those things where good video was important, and DigInfo News came through today. One thing that the video doesn’t elaborate on is how the robot is actually scanning the user’s head shape in three dimensions to figure out just the right amount of pressure to apply, and it’ll use that shape to remember who you are and what shampoo and massage settings you like.

In general, Panasonic is trying to create a robotic infrastructure to help Japan (and the rest of the world) deal with an aging population that’s going to need more and more support. As such, this system is primarily targeted at medical environments and not for installing in your bathroom. Yet.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ DigInfo ]

EMILY, the lifeguard robot we covered in June, has been getting a workout on the Oregon Coast. Part of this workout took place just a life preserver’s throw from a beach house my parents were staying at, and while they didn’t get any exclusive pictures or video or anything (I need to train them better, obviously), they did send me this footage from the local news:

If you can’t get the video to play (I had to try a few times), the upshot is that EMILY seems to get the rescuing job done without endangering any swimmers. The upshot is also that EMILY has a powerful motor and she doesn’t weigh much, and consequently gets more than a little bit of airtime when she goes over waves. Wheee!

EMILY is cheap at only $4000, and the Depoe Bay fire department hopes to have several of them deployed along the coast within the next few years.

[ Hydronalix ] VIA [ KGW ]

Thanks Mom & Dad!

Tandy Trower, who helped launch Microsoft Robotics Studio back in 2006, has started a brand spankin’ new robotics company called Hoaloha Robotics. The goal? Affordable ($5000 – $10000) socially assistive (i.e. elder care) robots in the next three to five years. Trower envisions a robot able to do all of the conventional remote monitoring and pill reminder stuff, but also able to assist with movement, object retrieval, and potentially provide some degree of intelligent social interaction.

Trower believes he can make an important contribution by developing a common interface and software that will make assistive robots easy to use and customize with applications, similar to the way Apple standardized the interface and application model for smartphones. “This is what primarily I believe is holding back most of the industry right now. It’s not that robots can’t be built, it’s that nobody has defined the software that’s going to turn robots into useful appliances,” he said.

Er, they haven’t? Hm.

“The components exist; it’s not difficult to build such a platform,” he said. “What people have lacked is the ability to envision what the right package should contain and, most important, what the applications and user interface should be.”

Now that’s something I wholeheartedly agree with. Or at least, I agree that the interface is going to be the tricky part. I’m not trying to minimize the amount of work that it’s going to take to get the hardware and programming up to snuff, but in order to be an effective assistive robot, the Hoaloha platform is going to have to be more independent than a Roomba or an XV-11, both of which are designed to be totally independent (more or less) and neither of which quite pulls it off. This, specifically, is what Hoaloha is going to be focusing on, partnering with other companies for hardware development. And when it comes to hardware components, they do exist, and they’re getting cheaper in leaps and bounds, making that three to five year timeframe (and the target price) potentially achievable.

Also, here’s the same obligatory quote we’ve been hearing for like the last decade:

Trower said the industry feels a lot like the early days of the PC, when there were Apple II and TRS-80 computers, but they weren’t yet doing a lot to enhance productivity or change people’s lives.

Dammit, I’m getting old over here… It feels like we’ve been stuck in the roboeighties forever.

[ Hoaloha Robotics ] VIA [ Seattle Times ] and [ Hizook ]

Thanks Dan!

See this friendly looking piece of equipment? Just stick your head in the middle there, and a tiny little robot will fix your eye problems and you’ll get telekinetic powers.* Those giant coils are very precise magnetic field generators, and they’re capable of manipulating a half-millimeter long microbot with a fine enough touch to get it to fix clots in the blood vessels in your eyes:

The whole system is called OctoMag, and the primary advantage that it offers (besides the robotic fine manipulation that makes other assistive surgical systems so promising) is that the microbot is completely untethered. So, instead of having to shove a bunch of needles into your eyeballs and dig around, one single needle can deposit the robot, which does its thing with minimal invasiveness and then comes back out via the same needle. Very tidy.

This same type of technology can also be used to do itty bitty construction projects, as in this video of the MiniMag magnetic micromanipulation system, which won the free-style and manipulation events at the 2010 NIST Microrobotics Challenge:

[ OctoMag (PDF) ]

*Telekinetic abilities not guaranteed

Earlier this year we posted about how people are starting to specifically request robot-assisted surgeries as opposed to having ‘just’ a human operate on them. Now, researchers at Duke are working on an entirely autonomous robot arm that can take biopsies on humans based on ultrasound data. It works pretty well, too, at least on the dead turkeys that they tried it out on:

“In the latest series of experiments, the robot guided the plunger to eight different locations on the simulated prostate tissue in 93 percent of its attempts.”

I’m not entirely sure what happened in that other 7 percent… Most likely a slight miss with minimal consequences for the ex-turkey, as opposed to the robot going berserk and wildly stabbing everything within reach. More importantly, I’m curious as to what what the average “miss” rate is for a human taking a biopsy based on an ultrasound.

In any case, the idea here is that robots will eventually (soon, perhaps?) be able to at the very least take care of simple, routine medical procedures which will save patients both time and money.

“We’re now testing the robot on a human mannequin seated at the examining table whose breast is constrained in a stiff bra cup,” Smith said. “The breast is composed of turkey breast tissue with an embedded grape to simulate a lesion.”

This is making me hungry. Vid, after the jump.

Incidentally, turkeys are used because they have similar flesh to humans, and they show up about the same on an ultrasound. Also, they’re tasty.

[ Duke ] VIA [ Daily Mail ]

Note: the robot in the picture, a DaVinci system, was not the robot being used for this study. And as far as I know, the turkey in the picture wasn’t involved either.

It’s times like these that I’m reminded just how miserable the world was before we had robots. Before robotic dental practice patients, what poor unfortunate souls had to sit through the inept and bumbling ministrations of wet behind the ears dental students? I weep for them. Hanako here weeps too, if you screw up. Touch sensors inside her mouth allow her to give authentic wincing and gagging feedback on your dental technique. She can obey orders like “ooooooopen… wider please… wider…” and she also sneezes, coughs, drools, turns her head, and fails to understand why dentists try to ask her about her life while they’re elbow deep inside her skull.

Hanako is brought to you by a group of universities in Japan in partnership with Tmsuk, makers of your favorite net-tossing security bot.

[ NODE (Translated) ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]