Xenex’s germ-zapping robot
Credit: Xenex

With the official Ebola death toll approaching 5,000, scientists are increasingly concerned with exploiting all possible ways of fighting this deadly disease. While the biggest labs around the world are working on a vaccine that will hopefully exterminate Ebola once and for all, roboticists are developing more unconventional ways of preventing the spread of the disease.

Recently, a lot of media attention has been focused on Xenex, a San Antonio-based company, which has developed a robotic assistant that helps medical professionals remove traces of infectious diseases, such as ebola, left in hospital premises. Even better, the robot can fence infections out 24/7 with 99,9 % efficiency, thus preventing any potential delays in the operation of a hospital.

The robot does that by firing powerful ultraviolet pulses that wipe out all nasty viruses and bacterias sneaking in the corners of hospital rooms. And while the technology of scrambling viral DNA with ultraviolet light is not particularly new, the idea of a roboticized Ebola killer is certainly to everybody’s liking.

But here is the catch: it does not take a genius to realize that Xenex’s machine has no more right to be called a robot than any other piece of medical equipment. What Xenox has developed is not an autonomous Roomba-like Ebola hunter. Essentially, it is a wheeled cart with a programmable ultraviolet lamp, and, although there is no doubt about its effectiveness in killing Ebola and other germs, we should choose words properly.

Does this mean, however, that robotics has nothing to offer in the biggest recorded outbreak of the virus?  Fortunatelly, the answer is no. Even existing medical robots have a huge potential for fighting diseases like Ebola, but deciding how to effectively use them in harsh conditions, such as those in West Africa, is a complicated issue.

In an attempt to clarify how robots can contribute to the ongoing battle, the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at Texas A&M University is organizing a policy workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers. The workshop will help identify what robots can do in order to minimize human contact with the virus, detect the virus and provide expert consulting to those who contracted the virus. You can learn more about the upcoming workshop HERE.

Credit: Daewoo

Everybody has been in a situation when we wish we had stronger arms or, even better, an extra pair of them. Whether it is attaching something large overhead or manipulating something heavy, we all know we are bound to run into the limitations of our own anatomical design. In some professions, such as construction work, these difficulties can surface practically every day. To make physical drudgery less stressful and traumatic, researchers around the globe are now developing a new kind of robots that will be worn on the body just like your regular backpack.

Wearable robotics flourishes on the collaboration between the human and the machine and has a huge potential in all kinds of physically challenging work. This idea has already been put to test by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world. Korean shipyards have long been known for their high degree of automatisation. Now it appears the Korean company has decided to go one step further.

The company has developed a wearable exoskeleton that allows workers to carry huge pieces of metal and other heavy components with no or little effort. The exoskeleton weighs around 30 kg, none of which, however, is felt by the wearer since the suit is designed to support itself and follow the wearer’s movements.

Credit: Daewoo

The prototype can lift and precisely manipulate objects with a mass of up to 30 kg. The test has demonstrated that this technology can indeed help workers with their daily tasks, although those who had a chance to take part in the test run say they would like to be able to move faster and lift even heavier weights – a goal the research team is already working towards: the current research target is an exoskeleton that can lift up to 100 kg and be used on a daily basis at shipyard facilities.

Another example of how wearable robots can literally give a hand to future workers comes from the MIT’s d’Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology. The lab is working on a pair of lightweight robotic arms attached to a backpack that are envisioned to assist people with those tasks where our two arms are just not enough.

The project called SRL (Supernumerary Robot Limbs) is supported by Boeing and was recently used in a demo that involved installing ceiling panels in an airplane, a highly repetitive task that is difficult to perform on your own. By pushing the panels against the ceiling, the device can alleviate the worker from the necessity of simultaneously holding the panel, inserting the screws and using the screwdriver to attach it.

Watch the video below to see the prototype in action.

Credit: University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign

Robots can be very strong, fast and enduring. However, unlike in animals, none of this strength comes from muscle, instead robots mainly rely on electrical motors and other hard and generally inflexible parts. But with all the advantages that conventional robot hardware can deliver, it still does not match the ability of muscle-powered animals to provide an accurate response to different physical environments. To address this downside of robotics, a group of researchers, led by Professor Rashid Bashir, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign developed tiny walking bio-robots powered by engineered muscle tissue.

The robot consists of a 6 mm long flexible 3D-printed backbone with two strains of muscle attached to each of its ends. The backbone has two little feet and is used both for walking and sustaining the structure. The important thing about the robot is that the muscle tissue used in it is the skeletal muscle, the one humans use to move around, which means that it can be easily turned on by administering electric impulses. Furthermore, by adjusting the frequency of the impulses, the robots’ speed can be modified.

The use of skeletal muscle allows for a better control over the robots’ movements. This significantly differs from the previous study conducted by the same group, where the researchers used heart tissue, which contracts non-stop and with a constant rate.

This technology is an important step on the way to integrating biological tissue in machines, which in some cases can be priceless. For example, muscle-powered robots are perfect for medical applications inside the body: the tissue is a perfect biodegradable material and such robots could run in a nutrient rich fluid without any additional power source. In addition, the use of muscle-powered limbs in biomimetic machine design would open hundreds of new possibilities, especially in the field of soft robotics. Imagine how much more lifelike a robotic starfish or octopus could be if powered by muscle tissue!

With the concept of a muscle-powered robot tested, the researchers are now preparing for the next step: the group envisions equipping their robots with light or chemically sensitive neurons for controlling direction of robot’s movement as well as testing new designs of the backbone to enable a wider range of motions.

The results of the study can found in PNAS in the article called “Three-dimensionally printed biological machines powered by skeletal muscle.”

Having spent almost ten years in a wheelchair after a car crash left her paralysed below the chest, Sophie Morgan was finally able to stand on her feet and walk again. What got her out of the wheelchair was not some kind of groundbreaking therapy, but a robotic exoskeleton developed by the New Zealand-based company Rex Bionics.

Rex Personal is controlled by a joystick embedded in its armrests and, unlike the majority of alternatives available today, does not require crutches to keep balance. Although making the exoskeleton bulkier and slower, this feature, in fact, changes the experience entirely, since Sophie and other users now can use their hands to accomplish everyday activities without worrying about loosing stability. “Once I stand up, I want to be able to do things. I want to be able to enjoy the benefit of actually being standing,” explains Sophie.

Apart from the obvious improvements in quality of life, such as increased mobility, the very experience of getting out of the wheelchair entails a whole range of physiological and phycological benefits like the ability to be closer to people, to talk to them eye to eye and, of course, to hug them and be hugged.

You can also read this post to learn about another type of exoskeletons such as Rewalk from ARGO Medical Technologies. 

Wiring electronic devices directly into your brain may not sound like a very pleasant idea, but this is exactly what so many scientists around the world seem to be quite excited about. The reason is that, far from being your worst cyborg nightmare, brain implants – also called neuroprostheses – can do true miracles. Connected to the nervous system, these little chips can make the blind see, the deaf hear and even allow the paralysed to once again gain control over the physical world.

The principle is shared by most existing neuroprostheses. An external device captures sensory information no longer obtainable by biological means, converts it into a series of electrical signals interpretable by the brain and sends them to the implant, which in turn passes the information to the brain. That said, the implants can be either attached to some kind of nerve – like the optic or auditory – or directly to the required area of the cortex, in which case the signals can take a shortcut.

Argus II developed and commercialised by Second Sight is the only approved visual neuroprosthesis currently available on the market. The device is a retinal implant, designed to bypass the damaged biological eye photoreceptors in patients suffering from severe consequences of the condition known as retinitis pigmentosa. For now, the image reconstructed by Argus is only a low-resolution approximation of the real thing, but as technology continues to advance, the capacity of such implants can improve beyond imaginable.

The system follows the principle described above and consists of a video camera, a video processing unit (VPU), and the implant itself. Watch the animation below to see how it works.

While visual neuroprostheses are only beginning to gain impulse, nearly 300,000 people around the world already use brain implants to restore another sense, their hearing. Cochlear implant, the most widely used neuroprosthesis, is the only hope for thousands of people with an ear malfunction. Below is another video, which shows the reaction of a 2-year-old boy hearing his mother’s voice for the first time. For a detailed overview of how the implant works, watch this video.

Another application of neuroprosthetics promises to one day restore lost learning functions in humans. A study, published recently in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology by a group of researchers, led by the SPECS group at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, demonstrates how a chip implanted into the brain of a living rat can actually restore a disabled function of the cerebellum – the part of the brain heavily responsible for the acquisition of motor memories. Specifically, with its cerebellum anaesthetised, the rat was conditioned to the acquisition of an eye-blink response, thus successfully using the neuroprosthetic chip to regain a disabled learning function.

Today, brain implants are still in their infancy. However, this does not prevent scientists from envisioning implants that can give us perfect memory, night vision and instant thought access to information. There is a whole bunch of bioengineering obstacles that need to be addressed (HERE is one that has just been overcome) for brain implants to become safe and accepted in society, but our future already seems inevitably cybernetic.

Read this article to learn more about how neuroprosthetics will change the world.

Advances in  medical technology have played a major role in increasing people’s average life expectancy.
Although a lot of new technology is costly to develop and run,  a  study by Frank R. Lichtenberg published in 2009 by the US’s National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that life expectancy increased more rapidly in states that made the most use out of top medical imaging technologies. And surprisingly, those states did not experience larger increases in medical expenditure per capita. So while new diagnostic technology may be more costly than than its older counterparts, it’s use is likely reducing the need for even more expensive medical treatment in the long-run.

When looking at how modern machines are changing medicine, let’s go beyond  technologies that merely allow doctors to see inside our bodies. What about something that could serve as working representations of our individual bodies, allowing health care providers to test medical treatments on our (sort of) virtual clones?  A recent article in The Telegraph examines the notion of human doppelgangers for all….

The article takes us back to the work of Denis Noble and his colleagues at Oxford who created a working computer model of the human heart back in 1960. Doctors are now able to use this model to test different types of treatments for all sorts of cardiac malfunction, and other advances of this nature have even given researchers new insight into blood diseases like Sickle-cell.

Naturally, it would only be a matter of time until researchers would attempt to tackle the most complex organ in the human body which is why there’s big money out there for projects aiming to map the brain. In Europe, the Human Brain Project has officially been awarded 1 billion euros to work on modelling the brain over the next 10 years. This is of course no small challenge, and the European team won’t be attempting to go it alone. They’re calling for the support of researchers around the globe in the hopes of founding an international centre for brain research much like CERN (The European Centre for Nuclear Research). The US has shown a similar commitment to this type of research through their BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) and with large-scale  projects like this underway, experts believe it won’t be long until it will be possible to simulate a full virtual human body allowing doctors to test surgeries and new drugs on a simulated patient made just for you.

If you’re interested in this, you may also want to check out an article By the BBC: Digital Medicine: Machines for Living

Does it make sense to study the living to make machines? Or explore the intricate architecture of a shell to design a building? Within this field, scientists look to nature for their best ideas—we’re talking about Biomimicry. It’s a scientific field that blends a flow of ideas from the biological sciences into engineering. Biomimetic research is bringing together scientists from disciplines such as Neuroscience, Cell Biology, Computation, Psychology, and many others to produce new technologies that make sense in today’s ever-changing world.

Nature’s been designing and creating some of the most incredibly sophisticated creatures and structures on earth for millions of years, so it’s time we get serious about figuring out what mother nature’s been doing right! But before scientists and policy makers can really get down to business, we need to know exactly where Biomimetics is at, which is why researchers Nathan F Lepora, Paul Verschure, and Tony J Prescott  published the paper: The state of the art in biomimetics in the journal of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

The trio set out to answer four main questions: How rapidly is the subject of Biomimetics expanding? Where is Biomimetic research being published?  What subjects does the field of Biomimetics encompass? And, are there research communities within Biomimetics? Here’s what was found after analysing a database of publications on Biomimetics over the last 15 years:

 Is the subject of Biomimetics expanding?

You bet! Biomimetic research has experienced explosive growth, with the number of published papers doubling every 2-3 years, currently reaching more than 3000 publications per year. Over the last 15 years, this growth has far outplaced that of science in general which only doubles about every 13 years.

 Which subjects does Biomimetics encompasses?

Just take a peek at the word cloud featured in this blog! It pictures the top 100 most common words found in Biomimetic papers. Their size is relative to the frequency that they occur in.

 Are there research communities within the field of Biomimetics?

Yes.  Five communities are evident. Robotics; Ethology-based robotics; Biomimetic actuators; Biomaterials science; and structural bioengineering. And, since these were found to be fairly interconnected, it supports the notion that biomimetics can be considered a single discipline.

 Where is Biomimetics research published?

57% of Biomimetics research is published in journals and 43% is published in conference proceedings. Biomaterials (Elsevier), Bioinspiration and Biomimetics (IOP), and Journal of Biomedical Materials Research (Wiley) are the top three journals publishing on the subject of biomimetics.

Go ahead and get on board with Biomimetics! For more info you access the full paper HERE

The European Commission has provided a grant for €780,800  to develop cognitive skills for rehabilitation robots being developed by CORBYS (Control Framework for Robotic Systems), a four year European project which began in February, 2011.

These robots will be used for the rehabilitation of people with  damaged limbs who are working towards walking again.  Robots created for this purpose already exist however, “the issue is that they need constant attention and monitoring by therapists and they cannot effectively monitor the human,” explains Dr. Polani who is developing methods to endow these kinds of robots with cognitive skills,  along with Dr. Farshid Amirabadollohian and a team at the University of Hertfordshire.

Specifically, researchers are working on a perception system that will allow the robot  to assess the physical and mental state of the environment it’s being deployed in. These fine tunings aim to create a rehabilitative machine that will understand what its user needs and act autonomously in  response to those needs. To accomplish this, researchers are turning to mother nature for some ideas- “we believe that all organisms optimise information and organize it efficiently in their niche and that this shapes their behaviour – in a way, it tells them to some extent what to do. We believe it will help our system to take decisions similar to organisms and to better ‘read’ the intentions of the human it supports,” said Dr Polani. “Furthermore, we will use these techniques to balance the lead-taking between robot and human.”

Partnerships of this nature are beginning to emerge around the world; the American company GeckoSystems, which specializes in mobile service robots, is about to undergo a joint venture with an undisclosed Chinese wheelchair manufacturing company to produce a line of ¨collision proof¨wheelchairs.  As is the case in many other nations, the Chinese population is rapidly ageing and the government is putting forth extensive resources in order to achieve their goal of providing quality universal healthcare by 2020.

The coordination action of Robot Companions for Citizens is another example of a European sponsored initiative which integrates advances in neuroscience, robotics and new materials. This initiative aims to create novel benefits for society by fostering  the development of new types of robots and a new industry at large.

Electro sensors inspired by fish who navigate their way through murky waters, robots that dance with the honeybees, and artificial muscles and blood vessels making their way into modern medicine. These are just a few of the research topics that were discussed at this year’s Living Machines Conference that took place from 9th to the 12th of July in Barcelona, Spain.

Chairs of the session  Paul Verschure, from Pompeu Fabra University and Tony Prescott from the University of Sheffield, welcomed delegates to one of Barcelona’s architectural gems; Antoni Gaudí’s La Pedrera building.

During 4 consecutive days, leading scientists in the fields of Biomimetics and Biohybryd systems gathered for pre-conference workshops, lectures, poster sessions, exhibitions and open panel sessions to present their work and discuss issues related to the development of real-word technologies inspired by biological systems.

The first day finished off with a panel-lead discussion centred on the question: why study nature? Co-chair Tony Prescott got dialogue flowing by providing two general reasons: to build technologies that could be useful in solving current challenges, and to better understand nature itself.  While the speakers and audience engaged in the discussion agreed that these are likely the main motives, other interesting opinions surged through out the conversation.

According to Barry Trimmer who specializes in Neurobiology at the University of Tufts,  by attempting to understand nature’s complexity, a biomimetic approach may allow us to bypass the limits of human creativity.

Toshio Fukuda who specializes in Micro-Nano Systems Engineering at Nagoya University is often inspired by particular functions or geometric shapes found in nature to help make devices such as the artificial blood vessels he works on more efficient.

Conversely, as a mechanical engineer specialized in aerodynamics, David Lentink  is not so much interested in biomimetics as an outfit for a design, but rather in specific principles which might make sense from an engineering point of view ¨ We don’t want to look at the final detail of a bird wing to make an aircraft because it’s simply too complex, but some of the principles are extremely useful and they allow scientists to really think outside the box.¨

While a biomimetic approach often involves studying some of the most puzzling aspects of nature scientists have yet to wrap their heads around, there are still many things nature can’t do. ¨ Biological systems satisfy many constraints at one time so they may not be optimal for any one function that we may want to imitate. Flight is a great example because we can do things by optimizing that birds just can’t do and we can exceed the capabilities of birds with jets and planes that we build,¨explained Frank Grasso, director of the Biomimetic and Cognitive Robotics lab at Brooklyn College, New York.

However, Dieter Braun, who specializes in Systems Biophysics at Ludwig Maximilians University, pointed out that it’s really a two-way learning stream and just because ¨evolution did not invent the bicycle¨ nature still has plenty of tricks to teach us and we need not be afraid of its complexity.

Check back to find out more on what what was shared during the 2012 Living Machines Conference; proceedings from the conference will be published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNAI/LNCS).

Running can be a challenging activity to get into and keep up. Whether it’s a friend or canine pal acting as a running buddy, the company often provides us with the motivation needed to push ourselves further or to get us out there on days when we’d rather not lace up those trainers. But since not everyone has a dog or an active friend, researchers at the Exertion Games Laboratory at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have recently created the Joggobot so you won’t have to be the lone ranger out there on the track!

The idea behind the Joggobot is relatively simple. Researchers took a flying quadrotor robot which was already commercially available and enabled it with a camera and marker tracking software. Then they made special T-shirts, to be worn by the joggers so that they can be tracked.

The Joggobot takes off from the ground once the marker on the user’s T-shirt has been identified, automatically rising to its height. Level with the marker on the T-shirt, the Joggobot positions itself about 3 m in front of the jogger, keeping ahead of them according to their pace. If the joggobot is ever unable to detect the jogger, it will  land itself immediately so there’s no need to worry about rogue robots in the sky!

Over the past few years, several companies have come out with apps for mobile phones and other electronic devices that are conducive to jogging however, the team at the Exertion Games Lab stresses the importance of embodying this kind of technology appropriately.

Preliminary research on the joggobot has found that ¨People were positive about the idea of having a flying robot accompanying them while jogging, distracting them from their exhaustion and challenging them to increase their effort. In particular, users appreciated that the system had a ‘body’, which seemed to match the embodied activity of jogging. This becomes particularly evident when compared to virtual jogging support systems such as those available on watches and mobile phones: reading the information during running is often difficult, but with Joggobot, participants thought interactions could be easier to comprehend¨.

Researchers hope to continue using the Joggobot to explore the idea of using robots to support us when exercising… would you jog with the Joggobot?
Click HERE to read more about the Joggobot on the Exertion Games Lab website.