Mission Critical, Fall 2011

Mission CritiCal • Fall 2011 1

VOLUME1 NO.3 • FALL 2011 • AUVSI • 2700 Sou th Qu in cy S t ree t , Su i t e 400 , A r l i ng ton , VA 22206 , USA

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Promoting and Supporting Unmanned Systems and Robotics

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6 Essential components

New products and technology in home and health care

VOLUME1 NO.3 • FALL 2011

These walls can talkEven though the thought of having a home that interacts with you is a far-off notion, many different fields are currently working on making this futuristic concept a reality.

Page 9

18 State of the art Where industry is conquering home robotics

On the cover:IRobot’s telepresence Ava robot and InTouch Health’s RP-Vanatage surgical telemonitoring robot. The companies are teaming up to jointly develop telepresence robot business opportunities.

CONTENTS

27 Q & A A leading expert discusses AI in the ER

30 Timeline The makings of da Vinci’s company

4 Mission CritiCal • Fall 2011

Mission Critical is published four times a year as an official publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Contents of the articles are the sole opinions of the authors and do not necessarily express the policies or opinion of the publisher, editor, AUVSI or any entity of the U.S. government. Materials may not be reproduced without writ-ten permission. All advertising will be subject to publisher’s approval and advertisers will agree to indemnify and relieve publisher of loss or claims resulting from advertising contents. Annual subscription and back issue/reprint requests may be addressed to AUVSI. Mission Critical is provided with AUVSI membership.

Their bodies, ourselvesTelepresence robotics are set to change everything from health care to commuting and conference calls.

29 Future jobsMedical robotics aim to aid doctor shortages, home robotics prime to be bullish

36 Uncanny valleyMaking service robots people like

38 Testing, testingUK hospitals adopt automatic guided

vehicles

40 Pop culture cornerHollywood’s take on robots in the home

42 Technology gapWillow Garage looks at open sourcing, while the University of Massachusetts tests telepresence guidelines

44 End usersThe hands of da Vinci

Page 20

Page 32

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AUVSI’s Mission Critical . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

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AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems eBrief . .Back Cover

Doctor robotRobotics are making their way into every facet of medical care, from diagnosis to the operating table. And the field is getting a little help from an unlikely source, one that’s Alex Trebek approved.


Editorial

VicePresidentofCommunications andPublications,Editor

Brett [email protected]

ManagingEditorDanielle Lucey

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AssociateEditorStephanie [email protected]

ContributingWriterMagnus Bennett

AdvertisingSeniorAdvertising

andMarketingManagerLisa Fick

[email protected]+1 571 255 7779

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PresidentandCEOMichael Toscano

ExecutiveVicePresidentGretchen West

AUVSIHeadquarters2700 South Quincy Street, Suite 400

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With this issue of Mission Critical, AUVSI delves into a new world of unmanned systems use, one that

will likely become familiar to all in coming years.

We’ve all heard about the soldiers oper-ating ground robots in Afghanistan and Iraq and about the eyes in the sky that un-manned aircrafts provide. The technology that makes that possible is also making its way into the home and into the office, and particularly into the field of health care.

In the near future, the phrase “the doctor will see you now,” may not mean that the doctor will be in the same room. In fact, he or she could be thousands of miles, even a continent, away. Using telepresence robots would allow a human doctor to cater to far-flung patients, which could be a particular boon in areas where transportation is dif-ficult.

Robotic surgery has made great strides in recent years. Not only does it allow sur-geons to be more precise, it shortens the recovery time for patients. The technology could eventually allow surgery to be done remotely, broadening the reach of caregiv-ers even further. When mankind begins to travel away from Earth, such technology won’t just be nice to have — it will be a requirement.

This technology isn’t limited to the medical profession. Businesses can use it, too. We look at a study of how telepresence robots can be used by a business with global hubs and spokes. Meetings at such places have traditionally been handled by telephone or video conferencing systems, but they have

one flaw that robots don’t: You can’t con-tinue a conversation as you walk down a hallway.

Unmanned systems technology doesn’t have to stay at the doctor’s office or at the workplace — it can follow you home. We take a look at “smart houses,” domiciles in-fused with sensors that allow them to moni-tor the health and safety of the occupants inside. Elements of the household can be controlled from touch pads or phones, and the homes can even come equipped with household robots that automatically go about their chores. Smart houses and tele-presence robots will also allow the elderly to stay in their homes longer and in better health. Relatives can visit virtually from far away.

Of course, there are plenty of challenges before this future becomes a reality. The technology must be more reliable so public acceptance can be earned; some job shifts may occur, which always provokes anxiety; and the cost must be brought down. Such shifts have already happened as a result of the computer revolution, and there’s no rea-son to think they can’t happen again with robotic systems.

Stay tuned for our next issue, which will look at unmanned systems that take on the dull, dirty, dangerous and difficult mission of exploration, whether for scientific knowl-edge, oil and gas development, or monitor-ing wildlife.

Editor’s message

Brett Davis


Spa days and hospital stays: Panasonic’s new robotic fleetEverything from hospital visits to hair washing will soon go high-tech. Panasonic announced the development of HOSPI-Rimo, a new communication assistance robot for people in hospitals. It also an-nounced changes to its Hair Washing Robot and RoboticBed. Pana-sonic showcased prototypes of all three systems at the 38th Interna-tional Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo from 5-7 Oct.

HOSPI-Rimo uses the same autonomous technologies as its cousin, the HOSPI bot, which delivers medication automatically. It has a hybrid mobility function that lets the robot move through autonomous sensing or via remote control. Using HOSPI-Rimo’s High Definition Visual Communications System, patients can have smooth two-way conversations with doctors or loved ones.

The Hair Washing Robot has been developed using Panasonic’s ro-bot hand technology and can complete the entire process of hair washing automatically: wetting, shampooing, rinsing, conditioning and drying. Three-dimensional pressure-control technology lets the washing arms move over a wider range of the head. Using an ad-vanced touch-panel interface, the user can even specify the spot to be washed, massaging pressure and washing mode.

The RoboticBed combines the technologies of an electric care as-sistance bed, electric wheelchair and existing Panasonic robot tech-nologies. People can move between the bed and the wheelchair on their own with the help of a common platform for all parts of the RoboticBed, a new tilted wheelchair restoration and separation function, and a user-friendly interface. The RoboticBed was first in-troduced in 2009.

The patch with a pulse on your healthThe Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., is aiming to use technology to accelerate the delivery of medicine to the battlefield.

Led by Alex Bordetsky, an associate professor in the school’s De-partment of Information Sciences, the concept would use networked sensors, along with unmanned air and ground vehicles, to detect medical issues and then transport medication to the patient.

Perhaps even more impressive: Bordetsky predicts the technology could be on the battlefield in five to seven years.

Essential Components

Panasonic’s suite of medi-cal care robots. All photos courtesy Panasonic.


while thinking of moving the cursor — a sensation known as proprioception — the monkeys were outfitted with robotic sleeves that fit over an arm. Once they were trained to move a cursor through thought, they then repeated the action with the robotic sleeve moving their arm in a similar fashion, as if their hand was moving the cursor. The re-sults showed increased information in the motor cortex cells received from the motion versus the data from only visual feedback. The researchers think the technology could play into exoskeleton technology.

“Wearable exoskeletal robots could pro-vide sensory information to patients with full or partial feeling,” says Nicholas Hatso-poulos, lead researcher on the project. “Al-ternatively, direct stimulation of the relevant area of the cortex could be used to repli-cate sensory feedback in patients who have lost both motor and sensory function.”

Researchers at la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have developed an “intelligent T-shirt” that monitors the human body. It’s designed to be used in hospitals and can even locate a patient, serving as a sort of GPS system that functions in enclosed spac-es. It can even tell if you’re lying down, walking or running.

The T-shirt, which is washable, includes electrodes that detect bioelectric power. There’s also a separate localization device that communicates with the information management system that would be installed in a hospital.

Eventually the researchers want to incor-porate the localization device into the shirt itself, and they foresee the technology be-ing more widely worn: Athletes could use it to monitor their heart rates and elderly patients could wear the Ts to monitor their health while remaining in their homes.

RoboDynamics unleashes Luna assistant robotSanta Monica, Calif.’s RoboDynamics is set to release 1,000 limited edition ver-sions of its Luna personal robot sometime in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a company release.

Featuring a native app store, PC architec-ture and an open Linus-based operating system, the robot is a part of the company’s so-called “Robotics Manifesto,” an aim to have a robot in every home in 10 years.

“Luna is a radical rethinking of personal robots, and we believe a beautifully de-signed, human-sized, open and afford-able personal robot will spark a flurry of innovations similar to what we’ve already seen in parallel industries such as PCs and mobiles,” says Fred Nikgohar, founder and CEO of RoboDynamics.

The robots, which feature a touchscreen display, Wi-Fi and USB ports, will retail ini-tially for $3,000. The company expects a wide release of the robot in the second half

Essential Components

“The curve on this is very steep,” he says. “Sometimes forecasts are slower than real-ity. So this is something I believe we are going to see not too far into the distance on the battlefield.”

The idea relies on devices called nano patches, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that adhere to a solder or to a combat uniform. If a soldier is wounded, the device monitors vital signs and then relays the extent of the injury to a doctor, who could be located anywhere in the world.

Unmanned ground vehicles would arrive at the injury and establish a data link or, if robust enough, move the patient to a safer location.

The university has partnered with Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System center and also the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command pararescue teams to do initial tests of the technology. Though so far the results show that humans perform the diag-nostic task quicker and with higher accura-cy, the patch can still prove valuable while the patient waits for human care.

With feeling! Extra senses aid in brain-machine interfaceControlling objects with only thoughts may seem futuristic, but to some scientists not only is it possible, it also could use a little polishing.

Researchers at the University of Chicago studied monkeys that were thought-con-trolling a computer cursor and determined they do so more accurately when given ad-ditional sensory feedback. The aim of the study was to further develop brain-machine interfaces for patients with spinal cord inju-ries and similar disabilities.

Scientists already know that the brain ac-tivity when thinking about doing something and actually doing it are the same. To give the monkeys a sense of position and motion

The intelligent health-monitoring T-shirt, developed by researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Photo courtesy the university.

The T-shirt will see you nowIs your blood pressure a little bit high or you feel like you’re running a fever? In the near future you may not have to see your doctor; you could just ask your T-shirt.


Essential Components — continued from Page 7

Mega cute autism bot heads to department storesThe Keepon, originally developed by re-searchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Japan’s National Institute of Informa-tion and Communications Technology, is one squeezably cute little robot that’s been used for more than five years as a social development tool for children with autism.

Now through the formation of the company BeatBots LLC, Keepon’s adorable nature is going global and will be released to major retailers, like Toys R Us, for around $50 — a far cry from the Pro version for research, which costs around $30,000.

The robot picks up on whatever song the owner is playing and does a rhythmically aware custom dance for each song.

Keepon’s autism research has worked by having therapists control the robot from

another room, and though many children have difficulty maintaining eye contact or expressing emotions to the therapist, when the kids see Keepon’s dance moves, it aids these behaviors.

A part of the proceeds from each sale of the commercial version of Keepon will fund future Keepon Pro autism research.

Robotics help paraplegic student stand tallFour years after a car accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, Austin Whitney stood up from his wheelchair and walked to receive his degree from the Uni-versity of California Berkeley. Whitney used a controller switch on a walker to direct the wearable robot, strapped around his legs, to move forward.

His success came with the help of a robotic exoskeleton developed by engineers at the university. Homayoon Kazerooni, professor of mechanical engineering, had been work-ing on robotic exoskeletons with his team of researchers since last fall. He and Whitney both hope the technology is more widely available soon.

“This technology can be accessible to a large number of people, and that is our mis-sion,” Kazerooni said in a press release. “We’re telling the community that this is possible. This is just the beginning of our work.”

of 2012 and will announce a new price level then.

“Our objective is to aggressively remove cost and complexity, thereby facilitating widespread consumer adoption while simul-taneously providing a unique ground floor opportunity for the developer community to bring innovative ideas to a financially vi-able robotics ecosystem,” says Nikgohar.

sCan it or Click it:Scan this barcode with your smartphone

to see Keepon’s latest music video.

RoboDynamic’s personal assistant robot Luna is getting a limited edition release later this year. Photo courtesy RoboDynamics.

Keepon Robot provides therapy for patients with Autism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTWA5tLNJ3c&feature=player_embedded


THE HOUSE OF THE FUTURE

ByDANIELLELUCEy

robotineveryhome.

Much like his now-modest vision for person-al computing, Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted in a 2006 Scientific American article that, one day, robotics would be as prolific as the technology for which he is known.

Unpredictable to Gates — and everyone else — at the time was the 2008 housing slump and financial upheaval that most of the world still struggles with; however, as holds true with most robotics, it seems, an industry of little helpers-that-could keep vacuuming, laundering and cooking along.

According to a 2010 International Federa-tion of Robotics study, the latest year for statistics, service robotics is a $13.2 bil-lion industry. For 2009, 5.6 million robots for domestic use and 3.1 million robots for entertainment or leisure were sold. IFR esti-mates the projected sales of all types of do-mestic robots could reach 6.7 million units from 2010 to 2013, with entertainment and leisure bots up 4.6 million.

The rosy future of in-home robotics isn’t purely reliant on a personal fleet of Rosie the robots, though. Homes themselves are slowly gaining intelligence in their own right and are just another example of how the aging Baby Boomer population will not go quietly into assisted living facilities. Scores of universities around the world are pouring research dollars, yen and euros into in-home sensors, cameras and aware appliances that could extend the indepen-dence of aging or disabled people.

And once these robotic-based technologies converge with at-home information technol-ogy-equipped houses, having robotics and automation in the home — or perhaps even a part of the home — could seem as neces-sary as owning a laptop, smartphone and tablet all at once.

Researching the smart homeTucked away in a retirement community eight miles off the University of Florida cam-pus in Gainesville, researchers have outfit-

ted a home with monitoring devices aimed at researching inhabitant behavior, though they’d never know it.

“In our case the demographics are good because Florida is the retirement capital of the world,” says Sumi Helal, director and principal investigator of UF’s Gator-Tech Smart Home. “We have the perfect subjects to ask them to help us.”

Aimed at monitoring the elderly and peo-ple with certain diseases or disabilities, re-searchers have kept the technology largely invisible so it’s not intrusive, but they are still able to track a person’s habits and deter-mine if there are any behavioral changes.

“Part of the success is to make the technol-ogy disappear and be invisible and out of the way,” he says. “The house was fitted with sensors and actuators and other de-vices, basically to do some tasks, such as monitoring what the user is doing.”

It has a smart floor that allows the home to track the location of people inside and can

The University of Florida’s Gator-Tech Smart Home appears like any other house from the outside — save a campus sign — but on the inside monitors its dwellers’ habits. Photo courtesy Sumi Helal.

How robotics and automation technology may one day shape the place we live

A


Robotic Houses — continued from Page 9

count the number of steps a dweller takes. It can also monitor hygiene and bathroom use, so the house can show longer-term trends that may correlate with changes in a person’s health.

Getting the home to understand what ex-actly you are doing, however, has proven to be tricky, says Helal. A researcher could spend time using machine learning and ar-tificial intelligence to tell if a person is cook-ing, for example, but even small changes in behavior make it difficult for the house to guess that activity accurately.

“One day you wake up and you run your algorithm and your smart home is watch-ing, but then the user comes up with a freak behavior, like change the way they do things completely,” he says. Even slight behaviors like a head scratch can be chal-lenging to the algorithm.

Right now his team is working on creating fuzzy algorithms that would see these small behaviors as a nonessential element of the activity. His goal is to move activity recogni-tion from just research into something us-able to programmers.

Though in the past researchers have cou-pled the brains of the home with informa-tion from mobile devices, Helal says the most promising interactive device in the home that he’s seen is the domestic robot.

The Gator-Tech Smart Home currently has two of these, one French and the other South Korean, that not only provide a lot of programmability for the researchers but also offer an emotional element to a per-son living in the house. The house team has done research in the past using iRobot Roombas. Regardless of platform or mobil-ity, Helal says they’re proving valuable.

“The common thing about these robots is that they are becoming an interesting de-vice,” he says, continuing that not all user interfaces in a home are acceptable. “Do-mestic robots create emotional ties with the user, and it is much better to talk to that silly, nice-looking, cute-looking robot than talking to the walls. It’s more spooky to talk to the walls.”

Robots, also unlike other devices, offer the element of persuasion, says Helal.

“In obesity for example … imagine telling the user to go on the Web so you can tell him something to convince him to eat less or send him a text message,” he says. “If you keep sending text messages, the user begins to have to manage these messages, at least delete them. It’s a chore. And we wanted something that’s so smooth that it almost becomes a pet.”

A Willow Garage illustration imagining its PR2 taking on a Rosie the robot role. Image courtesy Willow Garage.


Helal says the Asian market is moving ex-tremely quickly in this area, and he was en-couraged to see President Barack Obama support domestic robotics when he an-nounced the National Robotics Initiative in late June.

“American companies need to step up, because this is becoming an important ele-ment,” he says. “I think this is really impor-tant. We need more companies working on domestic robots in the U.S.”

The University of Florida’s Gator-Tech home isn’t the only robotics-equipped research home in the southern United States. The Georgia Institute of Technology hosts the Aware Home, a project borne out of a fac-ulty desire to study what kinds of technol-ogy are useful in a home setting. Focused on heath care, but also based on a desire to test home bandwidth capabilities, the university’s home started in 1998 and has

hosted many series of research projects.

One particular disability the Aware Home is researching is autism and how technol-ogy in the home can help all involved in a child’s therapy to become higher function-ing. For example, explains Brian Jones, di-rector of the Aware Home project, by using cameras to capture the child’s behavior, the child’s care network can then use that information to create a uniform approach to addressing the behavior. The National Science Foundation is funding this research-ing.

For future studies, the Aware Home is tran-sitioning its in-home technology so its series of sensors allows a more integrated envi-ronment and could reveal patterns of daily living, explains Jones. The researchers are monitoring things like electricity and wa-ter use and also determining if there’s any health data in that information.

“I’m looking at ways that some of these technologies, along with some that are fairly common, like motion sensors and door sensors, noninvasive heart respiration and motion sensors … how all these things can come together to build a better picture around certain conditions of interest,” says Jones.

Like the Gator-Tech Smart Home, Georgia Tech’s home uses robots to help with its re-search. Currently, Aware Home has a Wil-low Garage PR2 robot, and the research-ers are familiarizing subjects with the robot and studying how residents would like it to function. The robot could deliver medica-tion or remind a person to take it.

“This summer we actually had the robot in the home performing some of those activi-ties to see how some of the older adults re-sponded to the robot making mistakes or doing it correctly, how it delivered the medi-cation, for example, or how long it took it to pick up certain things,” he says.

Having a robot in a home setting is use-ful since it’s a very controlled environment, Jones says.

“It becomes an assistant to the caregiver,” says Jones. It could also become a feed-back mechanism for either talking to the in-dividual or providing some other feedback on how well they’re doing today. And it can be a sensor in the environment, so it’s able to observe behaviors.”

The robot could also be a social device,” says Jones, “somebody to confide in.”

sCan it or Click it:

Willow Garage’s PR2 robot was created for research that works with its open-source software. Photo courtesy Willow Garage.

To see Willow Garage’s PR2, which has been programmed to fetch a beer from the refrigerator,

scan this barcode with your smartphone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Cq0sy4TBs


At-home helperJeff Beck, president of iRobot’s home ro-bots division, says people get so emotional about their connection with the company’s flagship product, the vacuuming Roomba, that he’s received multiple letters a week since he started with the company about two years ago.

“It really set me back a little,” he says. “I started getting letters from people talking about their robotics in the first person. They give them names; they adopt them almost as family members.”

Beck notices that the younger generation tends to respond to the robots by having fun with them, say by filming cats riding around up top and posting it to YouTube, but the company’s older clients form a strong emo-tional bond with the company’s Roomba, robotic mop Scooba, pool cleaner Verro and gutter cleaner Looj.

“You get people who are wounded veterans or elderly people and they’ll write letters saying, ‘Because of Roomba and Scooba, I’m able to live in my home more comfort-ably. I don’t have to worry about pushing a vacuum cleaner or mopping my floors.’ Those types of things happen all the time.”

The company, which gained about 55 per-cent of its 2010 sales from its domestic ro-bot division versus military ground vehicles, is successful in the still burgeoning field of domestic robots by focusing on practicality, Beck says.

“Our primary business, different than a lot of other companies, is that we’re really looking to develop and deploy practical ro-bots that are useful and do lots of jobs that people don’t like to do every day in their homes,” Beck says.

With strong customer sales in the United States, Western Europe, Japan and South


IRobot’s latest robot, Ava, is aimed at the health-care market. Photo courtesy iRobot Corp.

IRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner is its most popular domestic robot to date, having sold more than 6 million copies. Photo courtesy iRobot Corp.

sCan it or Click it:Scan this barcode with your smartphone to see the most popular YouTube video of iRobot’s Roomba. A cat taking the product for a spin has more than 6.6 million hits on the website.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-jv8g1YVI


Korea — iRobot has sold more than six mil-lion Roombas since 2002 — the Massachu-setts-based outgrowth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focuses on marketing to a demographic they call the “meticulous techie.”

“That’s essentially people who are well ed-ucated, higher income bracket, very busy with their lives, they work a lot, they don’t have a lot of time to do household chores,” he says, “but they’re also at the same time very, very house proud. … They like to have friends over and entertain.”

Having grossed more than $230 million in 2010, the company is constantly study-ing new domestic areas of interest to its market segment and does focus groups on how those robots would work to maintain people’s homes. Much like the computer boom of the last 50 years, iRobot believes that one day there will be multiple robots in every home, says Beck.

“The biggest challenge, quite frankly, is believability,” Beck says. “We still devote the majority of our marketing activities to demonstrating products and making sure that people understand they really do work. They almost look too good to be true in some cases.”

Simplicity and usability will also be key, he says, just like they were for home comput-ing.

“When I look at something like an iPad, I think that the brilliance of that product is not so much in its computing power but that it’s easy to use,” he says.

In fact, iRobot uses tablets as the “head” of one of its newest creations, Ava, a home and healthcare robotics platform. The com-pany recently teamed up with California telemedicine company InTouch Health, and the team is working on developing a remote presence capability for healthcare providers.

Open-source home roboticsAlthough fellow robotics company Willow Garage doesn’t make specific robots for

HD Media Systems relied heavily on Apple prod-ucts to set up a user-friendly series of controls for the home, some of which were mounted into the walls. Photo courtesy HD Media Systems.

vacuuming or other tasks, the Silicon Valley company does have two robots, Personal Robot 2 (PR2) and the smaller, cheaper TurtleBot, that, using open-source software, can be transformed into personal helpers.

The University of California Berkeley has programmed a PR2 — which at $400,000 a platform is intended for research — that has learned how to sort socks and fold laun-dry, with the long-term plan of performing the entire laundry cycle. The Technical Uni-versity of Munich is focusing on how the PR2 can cook a traditional Bavarian break-fast.

“The reason that we focus on personal robotics is that’s where we think there’s the greatest opportunity for a big impact

in terms of making a change in people’s lives,” says Willow Garage’s Brian Gerkey, director of open-source development.

Though some don’t see the immediate rel-evance of these projects — the most high-profile coming from Sen. Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, who in June publicly denounced National Science Foundation spending on robotics projects like Berkeley’s laundry folder — Willow Garage is invested in these robots one day being everywhere.

“I would say that we’ve met a lot of prog-ress in the last 20 years in robotics, and the last five years more on the personal robot-ics side, robots in and around the spaces where people are,” says Gerkey.

iPhone homeUsing available open-source media is also the current trend in automated housing.

Company HD Media Systems, a custom technology home integrator headquartered in Jackson, Mo., won the 2011 Electronic House magazine Home of the Year Award, outfitting a house with only $50,000 in technology, orders of magnitude less than the second and third place homes, says company co-owner Drew Balsman.

Customized with automatic lights, preset shower temperatures and irons that set themselves for morning use, the award win-ning home, designed by Bravo’s “Flipping Out” star Jeff Lewis, was able to be cheaply renovated via heavy reliance on Apple products located throughout the home that control its features. The three children over the age of nine in the house each have one of the family’s eight iPhones, and four iPod Touches and eight iPads are throughout the home — some of the iPads permanently mounted in the walls — and can control anything in the house.

“You can do anything in the house from any of those pads that I want them to do,” says Balsman. “Now for the kids I don’t give them full access to the house. I give them access to their rooms, their TV, maybe the playroom, some basic lighting control. That’s it.”

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Home entertaining is easy too: Any guest with an iPhone or iPad can plug into the sys-tem and have their music playlist or home video displayed throughout the house.

The company, only five years old, was borne from Balsman and his partner Scott Starzinger’s realization that information technology and audiovisual home technol-ogy are headed on a collision course.

“The exciting thing for me when we start talking about automation is it’s getting to a point where, honestly, three, four years ago, if it wasn’t a high-end client that had the money to really invest in it, it wasn’t something that we talked about. And now I talk about entry-level automation with es-sentially every single customer that I’m in front of, whether it’s a small single-room job or whatever. We’re talking about the basics of automation all the time.”

When the company started, it typically would only work on homes in about a 150-

mile radius from its headquarters, explains Balsman, but with the growing popularity of the home automation market and HD Media Systems’ growing profile, they’ve expanded to take calls from the East Coast, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee.

And as home technology customization gets more popular, Balsman says the price to automate features drops. Before the iPad’s release, a single touchscreen interface in a home could cost about $5,000.

“When you look at mainstream, you can start with something as simple as a couple light switches, an iPad interface, a ther-mostat and a basic controller. You can get started on those things for literally less than $1,000.”

In addition to the dropping price of many of these technologies, some of the features themselves are cost savers too, particularly for large homes.

“We have a large home that was done about a decade ago that has 350 some odd different individual light loads,” says Balsman. “I mean it’s a huge house; we’re talking 15,000 square feet plus. We up-dated that particular customer to a new lighting control system with different types of sensors that had light harvesting, and we went in and added some motion detectors so it would automatically shut down differ-ent zones when they weren’t being used, and we cut his electric bill probably by 30 percent in the course of just two months. And when your electric bill is two grand a month? That’s a big deal.”

Extravagant systems are more versatile and programmable than entry-level work, says Balsman. In the Electronic House home, the technology revolved around a Savant control system. Made by Savant Systems, the home technology controller is the only Apple-based home automation system on the market.


The Electronic House magazine Home of the Year was outfitted with gadgets from HD Media Systems, a home audiovisual and automation company. Photo courtesy HD Media Systems.

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“There are some advantages to that,” ex-plains Balsman. “It’s extremely robust, the GUI [graphical user interface] is fantastic. Their product is probably the most solid, stable platform I’ve ever seen.”

The Electronic House home has been func-tioning for a year without a single crash, he says, “and in my experience, that’s un-heard of.”

Also, by structuring the backbone of the Savant system around Apple, whenever the tech giant releases a new operating system, the home gets automatically updated with it.

Balsman can also update home features on the fly and remotely. He recently altered a home for the school year so that the lights of the house and a song slowly wake the children when it’s time to get ready. And when it gets to crunch time, a voice tells the children how much time they have left before they have to leave the house.

“Once they understand what’s capable, it’s really just up to your imagination to come up with different scenarios that are useful for them, which I think that’s the key,” Bals-man says.

A child’s bedroom from the Electronic House Home of the Year winner. Once they reach a certain age, the kids in the home also use iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches to control a limited number of settings. Photo courtesy HD Media Systems.

Although right now a lot of these home fea-tures require human interaction, Balsman believes the technology is currently on the cusp of becoming truly autonomous.

“Honestly, in my opinion, that’s where we’re at right now,” he says. “What you’re seeing and what you’re starting to see the focus of most of the automation companies is to truly make it automated, where it’s truly a matter of scheduling or where the house is interactive on its own attributes. That’s the next step.”

With current technology, the push of a but-ton can control anything that’s tied into the Savant system, including elevators and even a quirky chandelier in the winning home that flashes to show that the bath-room is out of toilet paper.

“But it’s still by the press of a button,” Bals-man admits. “So the next step is really get-ting the house to interact on different sce-narios or different themes, so to speak.”

Right now there are a few fairly standard automated features, like blinds and shades that adjust to outdoor lighting and weather or turning on and off a pool’s features. In the future, the end user could input his feed-back and the house could react to that au-tomatically.

Some technologies in their infancy now in-corporate Bluetooth sensing, says Balsman, so the house can sense where its inhabit-ants are at all times. For example, if a par-ent is driving near the house, its gates and garage door can open automatically when it senses the car is coming near.

“The trick is to start integrating all those dif-ferent aspects of your daily life and start doing it automatically.”

Danielle Lucey is managing editor of Mis-sion Critical.

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Berkeley, Calif.

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley are work-ing hard at making a robot that performs one of the most monoto-nous chores: the laundry. The robot currently only folds items — pretty slowly at that — but in the future the team aims for it to complete the entire laundry process.

Bedford, Mass.

The headquarters for iRobot Corp., the Boston metro area has churned out millions of ro-botic vacuums in the company’s flagship product, the Roomba. Other current at-home helpers include a floor washer, pool cleaner and gutter clearer.

Nashua, N.H.

Nashua is home to VGo Commu-nications, makers of a robot that may one day join the workforce. The telepresence robot VGo can act as a remote professional or student, which it did for a ninth grader in Knox City, Texas, this year whose immune system was too compromised to attend school.

Menlo Park, Calif.

Employees at Menlo Park company Willow Garage tasked a robot with a dream job for any couch potato that doesn’t want to miss a second of Monday Night Football® — a robot that will fetch you a beer. The company used its PR2 and programmed it to get you specific brands of beer out of the fridge, and it’ll even tell you if your favorite brew has been dried up.

Atlanta, Ga.

Under the leadership of Charles Kemp, Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Lab has worked since 2007 to develop robotic sys-tems that assist the elderly or disabled with manipulating their environments.

Pontiac, Mich.

Though Michigan is known more for its au-tomotive industry, it also has another market cornered: robotic litter box cleaning. Made by Automated Pet Care Products Inc., the Litter-Robot takes care of the kitty litter scoop-ing for days, sensing when the cat leaves the litter box and then cleaning it through a rotating motion. Warning though: The sensor isn’t strong enough to sense kittens and small cats and could send them tumbling if left automatic mode.

A world of home robotsstatE oF tHE art


Pardesia, Israel

Pardesia is home to retailer Friendly Robotics, which supplies products to the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The company released Robomow, its robotic lawn mower, in 1998. It has also made robotic vacuum cleaners and golf carts.

Örebro, Sweden

Örebro University is spearheading the pan-European program ExCITE (Enabling SoCial Interaction Through Embodiment), which is monitoring the use of telepresence robots in individual homes and in assisted living spaces in a multi-country, multi-year study.

Jinan, Shandong Province, China

At the Dalu Robot Restaurant in Jinan, robots have replaced the front-of-the-house staff, serving as receptionists, hosts and even waiters. Though human cooks still handle the food in the kitchen, tracked robots riding bicycles offer patrons drinks and dishes on their own.

Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, or AIST, was the birthplace of Paro, the robotic baby harp seal tasked at having a soothing effect on hospital patients and nursing home residents. The product is now sold in the U.S. by PARO Robots U.S. Inc., headquartered in Itasca, Ill., and in Europe via the Paro Clinic in Odense, Denmark.

Hong Kong, China

Hong Kong holds the headquarters of WowWee Group Ltd., a company that, in addition to a long line of toys, makes the Wi-Fi enabled Rovio, a mo-bile webcam that lets the user interact with its environment through audio and video. Coupled with a TrueTrack Room Beacon, the robot can navigate waypoints, keeping watch over the premises.

Stuttgart, Germany

Stuttgart’s claim to robotic fame is the devel-opment of the Care-O-bot, created by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineer-ing and Automation. The mobile household aid was created in 1998 and works as an “interac-tive butler,” according to the institute.

The perfect combination of helper robots or telepresence tools may not be in every home just yet, but they are scattered across the globe, coming from a variety of companies in different parts of the world. Here’s a look at a collection of places making robots right now that could be our future personal assistants.


Robots atthe watercooler andat home

ByBRETTDAVIS

The top half of Hugo, a VGo Communications telepresence robot, has been augmented with a light-up LED tie used to indicate the robot’s current status. The driver can be seen on Hugo’s screen. Photo by Adam Norton.

Usingtelepresencerobotstomaketheworkplace,homelifemoreflexible

ome new sales figures have come in, and you need to discuss them with your team.

Problem: They’re in Seattle and you’re on vacation in the Bahamas. Solution: Call up the office manager and say, “Get the robots out of the closet; we need to have a team meeting.”

Not long after, you’re able to control a robot via long distance, looking at the charts with its camera, talking with your colleagues via its speakers and mi-crophones. When the meeting breaks up, you’re able to walk to the kitchen with one colleague to conclude a bit of unfinished business.

When the meeting is all done, the robot goes back in the closet, and you signal the waiter for another drink.

Farfetched? Not at all. Although there are still a few kinks to work out, it’s already been done.

Google’s robotsResearcher Katherine Tsui of the University of Massachusetts Lowell worked with colleagues Munjal Desai and Holly Yanco and Google Inc.’s Chris Uhlik to test how telepresence robots could function in an office environment.

In a study conducted in the summer of 2010, the researchers studied the vari-ous ways that telepresence robots could be used at the search engine giant. Although Google has sophisticated video conferencing equipment, it didn’t yet have robots, Tsui says (Google co-founder Larry Page had one, but it was for his personal use).

“It’s a novel thing, people like to use it. It’s just going to be a few years before they become really pervasive and people use them instead of video conferencing,” she tells Mission Critical. However, “there’s a lot of talk about how much work gets done in social contact. That’s where being outside of a standard video conference room really helps.”

S


In a paper presented at the 2011 Human-Robot Interaction conference in Switzerland, Tsui and her partners noted, “commercial telepresence robots can be described as embodied video conferencing on wheels. These new telepresence robots provide a physical presence and independent mo-bility in addition to communication, unlike other video conferencing technologies.”

The researchers introduced two robot mod-els to Google: the QB, built by Mountain View, Calif.-based Anybots, and the VGo, built by VGo Communications of Nashua, N.H. The QB stands a bit over six feet, has three microphones, two cameras and one speaker. The VGo is four feet tall, has four microphones, one camera and two speak-ers.

The researchers placed those robots in a va-riety of team meeting settings. In some, the teams were “hub-hub,” meaning most of the team was working in one of two places. In others, the arrangement was “hub-spoke,” with most workers in one place and a few situated elsewhere.

The findings? The robots were used for 16 meetings of the various teams. Of those, in only six cases could the robots be used all the way through. In 10 of the meetings, “the robot drivers resorted to using video conferencing partway through the meeting or at the start of the meeting due to techni-cal issues with the robots.”

Technical issues included maintaining a clear audio and video connection, ensur-ing that the robot operators could hear and be heard by the people in the room and those video conferencing, and mitigating feedback from the multiple speaker and microphone configurations needed to use the robots and video conferencing simulta-neously.

It wasn’t that the robots were bored or just didn’t like meetings.

“In those cases, it was mostly that the robots we were using were still in prerelease form, so we had beta-ready QB and alpha-ready VGo systems that were still actively being developed,” Tsui says.

Beyond that, the findings indicate that the usefulness of telepresence robots can hinge on how the workers are arranged and what sort of connections they’ve had before.

“We believe that telepresence robots will be best used by people who are in hub-spoke team configurations and are in the spoke position, particularly for people who change locations to a spoke after being part of a hub,” Tsui and her partners wrote in the paper.

In one instance, the manager and employ-ee were used to talking via speakerphone and didn’t need to look at the same charts and graphs, so the robot was overkill.

Telepresence robots can make peo-ple feel like they’re still part of the team, but it’s better if that bond exist-ed before the robots were introduced. “A lot of businesses, at least in the 1990s, one strategy they used to make new em-ployees feel part of the company was to fly them out there for a couple of days or a week. I know that two of the operators did

Hugo, an augmented VGo Communications telepres-ence robot, is being driven remotely and being used to walk alongside a colleague, actively participating in a mobile conversation. The driver can be seen on Hugo’s screen. Kate Tsui is the robot driver and next to her is Adam Norton, an educator and designer working in the UMass Lowell Robotics Lab. Photo by John Fertitta.

have prior experiences being a team mem-ber at the hub, and they missed that kind of social interaction that they had,” Tsui said.

Tsui and her partners also looked at the use of telepresence robots for hallway conver-sations after a main meeting ended. Often, work talk continues as employees walk out of formal meetings. That’s one place where video conferencing can’t follow, but robots can.

The researchers recruited participants who didn’t know each other and paired them for walking and talking sessions. One of each was randomly chosen to drive the robot.

The results showed that robots that might be good for a regular meeting aren’t yet great for hallway chats. The human participant had to walk slightly ahead of the robot and look back to see the other participant’s face on the screen, which is unnatural. Also, the person driving the robot had to pay atten-tion to avoid obstacles and steer while also trying to talk.


Adding more motion autonomy would help, as would the addition of a swiveling head.

“It’s better for the person talking if the robot is moving more like people do,” Tsui says.

In the futureDown the line, Tsui foresees that offices of 25 to 30 people or more might have telep-resence robots parked throughout the build-ing for meeting use.

“I think the real benefit there is for the infor-mal sort of meetings. I’m looking for some-one, I need to do a quick brainstorm, face to face would be easier, but I can’t just hop on a flight and come over there,” she says.

The robots would need to work well so users could just use them without thinking about their function.

Tsui and the other researchers say future studies could look at how the interpersonal relationships between robot drivers and their human colleagues change over time and how office bystanders who don’t use the robots perceive them.

In the meantime, however, Tsui is embark-ing on a study of how telepresence robots can benefit people who are hospitalized but still want to visit their families. She has set up telepresence robots with three peo-ple at a hospital and plans to begin that work in October.

Researchers in Europe are also conduct-ing a study of using telepresence robots for social purposes in a pan-European ef-fort named Enabling SoCial Interaction Through Embodiment (ExCITE), which uses Giraff Technologies’ Giraff telepresence ro-bot. The design of the robot is expected to change as the manufacturer incorporates feedback from users in the studies.

There are two current ExCITE test sites (ultimately there will be a dozen spread over three countries, with each operating for eight months to a year). One is a daily rehabilitation center for patients who have

suffered strokes or similar traumas.

“Each Wednesday one particular group is visited by the head of the center via the Gi-raff robot,” ExCITE’s Amy Loutfi, an associ-ate professor at Örebro University’s Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, writes in an email. “She collects updates on their status and may ask them to perform certain exercises to evaluate their progress.” The other site is an assisted living facility in a small town in the north of Sweden, where the Giraff is used in a common area so the residents can interact with friends and family. “Today’s senior citizens are active members of society, with wide social circles

ple connecting to the unit” and “the type of environment in which the Giraff system is placed,” Loutfi writes.

Loutfi says she expects telepresence to play a significant role in future social interaction. “In fact, if you look at how most novice computer users use ICT [interactive commu-nication technologies], it is predominantly for social interaction. I think robotics is no exception and I think for very specific ap-plications, robotic telepresence has a role to play.”

Robots at homeThat leads to another scenario. Say your grandmother lives alone but is getting on up in years and you’re worried that she’s not taking her medicine, or eating right, or she turns on the air conditioning when she means to turn on the heater.

You don’t live nearby but you’d like to visit with her more often, and not just on the phone. Could a telepresence robot help with that?

Researchers at Georgia Tech and Willow Garage looked into such a scenario, pair-ing elderly study participants with robots that they could drive or that others could drive to come visit them.

Jenay Beer of Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology — a graduate student in the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory — worked with Leila Takayama of Willow Garage to examine how a dozen elderly citizens, aged 63 to 88, interacted with telepresence robots and how they felt about using them.

Willow Garage produces the Personal Robot 2, the TurtleBot and developed the Texai, which is now sold by a spin-off com-pany named Suitable Technologies Inc. Beer and Takayama worked with prototype versions of Texai for their study.

The researchers looked at older adults who had no apparently disabilities or mental decline.

Telerobotics — continued from Page 21

“Today’s senior citizens are

active members of society, with

wide social circles to friends,

family and former colleagues.

However, the onset of age

related impairment can often

lead to decreased mobility,

social interaction and a

sensation of isolation.”

– Amy Loutfi

of friends, family and former colleagues. However, the onset of age related impair-ment can often lead to decreased mobility, social interaction and a sensation of isola-tion,” she writes.

ExCITE is being coordinated by Swe-den’s Örebro University in partner-ship with Consiglio Nazionale del-le Richerche and Ratio Consulta of Italy, the University of Malaga of Spain and the Giraff maker, based in Sweden. “What we want to see is in which environ-ment we can expect the Giraff to have the greatest utility. So the major differences [be-tween the test sites] are ... the type of peo-


“We focused on healthy, independent older adults,” Beer tells Mission Critical. “Most adults live independently in their own homes. A lot of research has focused on adults with dementia or in nursing homes, assisted living sort of settings, but we want-ed to focus on independent adults.”

In a paper delivered at the HRI 2011 con-ference, Beer and Takayama wrote that while it’s commonly assumed that the elder-ly don’t accept new technology, that’s not what they found with this pool of a dozen California residents.

“The older adults were surprisingly posi-tive about the idea of using a mobile robot system, and they definitely could see the benefits it could have on their lives. There were many more benefits than concerns,” Beer says.

The participants “mentioned they could see a benefit of using a telepresence system over a telephone,” she says. “They could see the person and have a more intimate interaction with that person. They also men-tioned reduced travel time. Losing the abil-ity to drive would affect that.”

In the study, each participant interacted with a visitor who operated the robot, and each participant also used the robot to visit someone else.

That led to one surprising finding: The par-ticipants preferred driving the robot to hav-ing someone else visit them.

“They said, ‘I don’t want my kids visiting me all the time. I want them to visit me, but not just whenever they want. And I want to visit places that would otherwise be difficult for me to get to,’” Takayama says.

Some of the participants did not find the robots to be perfect. The Texai resembles a laptop on a stick, and some of the study group said they would prefer it to have rounded edges.

“The older adults would say it has very sharp corners and edges. That’s not the same as saying we want it to be more hu-manoid. That’s saying we want it to have

softer curves,” Takayama says. “I think they just want it to look more finished, par-ticularly if it’s in a home environment. … They don’t want it to be an eyesore in their home.”

Some participants also found the mouse-click interface for driving the robot to be less than perfect, so future home telepres-ence robots may need more familiar mech-anisms, such as steering wheels.

One of the major surprises that came from the research was that the participants were very concerned about the etiquette of using telepresence robots. If the phone rings, you can just ignore it. If a robot shows up at your door with your friend’s face beaming expectantly from the monitor, that’s a little harder to do.

“Older adults mentioned at length about etiquette, that using the Texai would be a lot different than using a telephone,” Beer says. “With a system where there’s visual-ization incorporated, there’s a whole new set of social rules that might have to be put in place.”

Eighteen percent of the participants listed et-iquette as a major concern, even more than were concerned about privacy (15 percent) or difficulty

of use (nine percent). “I thought etiquette would be in there somewhere, but I didn’t think it would be that important,” Takayama says. “I thought it would be safety.”

There was another surprise: The partici-pants were really more interested in using the robot to go outside, such as to concerts or sporting events, than they were to have one rattling around the house.

“There’s a lot of research that’s looking at putting robots in the home,” Takayama says. “A lot of these adults were saying, ‘I’d rather drive the robot somewhere else.’ You could put the robot in a concert hall or the baseball stadium, and then I can go to those events and be there in a way that I can’t be just watching it on television. That’s the flip opposite of a lot of work that’s being done right now.”

So, just as future workplaces may have telepresence robots stashed in the closet, concert halls and ballparks could have their own collections, so you could make sure your grandmother ate her dinner and then take her out to the ballgame.

Georgia Tech’s Jenay Beer, right, works with a study particpant and a Texai telepresence robot. Photos courtesy Jenay Beer.


Henry Evans was forced into the role of becoming a robot user.

When he was 40 years old, Evans, father of three, suffered a brain stem stroke that left him mute and paraplegic. Through enormous work, he was able to gain limited use of one finger and can now move his head.

Other than that, the California resident is dependent on technology to help him com-municate with the outside world. Initially after his stroke, he relied on “the board,” a panel with letters arranged in groups. He would look at a specific group of letters and someone — often his wife — would read out the letters until she reached the one he wanted, at which time he would blink. As he wrote in his blog, it was maddeningly slow.

In the years since, he has been aided by various technologies, from a laser pointer that would allow him to turn on a television to his latest, much more ambitious endeav-or — controlling a robot.

Last year, “I was lying in bed, watching TV as usual, and suddenly I was staring at this wonderful robot,” Evans writes in an email interview with Mission Critical. “Almost im-mediately I imagined using it as a surrogate for my own worthless body. I even imag-ined the type of interface I would need to drive it with my head tracker.”

The robot he saw was Willow Garage’s Per-sonal Robot 2, as used by Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Laboratory, founded and headed by Charles C. Kemp.

“As soon as my wife got me up, I Googled

Willow Garage and learned they were nearby. I emailed them and to my surprise they responded right away and were inter-ested. They immediately introduced me to Dr. Kemp, who was already doing some-thing similar to this and was extremely en-thusiastic. One thing led to another, and here we are!”

Evans, the company and the lab are col-laborating on a project called Robots for Humanity, aimed at showing the potential for personal robots to assist people with dis-abilities.

“I actually came up with the name Robots for Humanity about five years ago,” Evans writes. “I imagined developing technolo-gies to help disabled people and raising money for them from people who had made

Henry Evans, in wheelchair, his wife, Jane, and staff from Willow Garage and Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Laboratory. Steve Cousins (president of Willow Garage), and Charlie Kemp (director of the robotics lab) are to the right of the PR2 robot. Photo courtesy Georgia Tech.

Control: How a robot can help when your body fails


money in electronics in Silicon Valley (or by getting a government grant). I even tried, halfheartedly, raising money, and sent out many emails soliciting help. Nothing stuck until I met Steve [Cousins, president and CEO of Willow Garage] and Charlie. It turned out they were already doing this, and we just joined forces. They refined my interface and liked the name.”

The team has developed a variety of inter-faces, tools and control software for Evans to use. All of the controls are Web based, so he doesn’t need to download anything, according to Georgia Tech graduate stu-dent Philip Grice. Evans had earlier used PowerPoint to design an interface for using the robot.

This spring, researchers from Georgia Tech and Willow Garage met with Evans and his wife Jane in California. For the first time in a decade, he was able to control the robot and scratch his own face. On a later visit, he was able to use PR2 to shave his own cheek.

“It is much easier to do something yourself (via the robot) than it is to try to describe to someone else what I want done,” he writes. “It’s also really satisfying to have complete control over what you say/do, like most people do.”

Evans is able to issue commands to the PR2, which can be either in the same room with him or thousands of miles away — he often remotely controls Georgia Tech’s PR2 from his home.

Using a head tracker, he can directly move the robot’s body, including its arms and head. He can also invoke the robot’s autonomous behaviors, such as having it move to his wheelchair and reach out to a pre-selected location so he could scratch his face.

“Everybody, including me, is busily work-ing on the next series of capabilities and in-terfaces, and I would prefer to wait until we know that they work before we talk about them,” he writes. “We should have more to say by Christmas. In general, though, I often remotely pilot the robot at Georgia Tech, and I provide user feedback to every-body.”

All of the technologies he has used, includ-ing the robot, “have to help me manipulate my environment,” he writes. Robotics can “serve as an interface between the person’s mind and their environment (in any number of ways) when they can no longer do it with their body.”

He does have some thoughts for improve-ments, however.

“I would like a faster communications inter-face, a direct BMI (brain-machine interface) would be ideal.”

Also, future devices must adhere to what he calls the “caregiver principle.”

“The following principle is also fundamen-tal to whatever we do. It is not obvious and took me years to learn. It is: The caregiver principle — no matter how much assistance a device provides to a patient, it will not be used regularly unless it also takes no time to either set up or use by the caregiver and unless it makes the cargiver’s life … a lot easier (does not apply to medical treat-ments ordered by the physician).”

Georgia Tech’s Kemp says, “This is just the beginning. We hope to really push on these technologies so robots like this can actually help people every day.”

sCan it or Click it:To see a video about Henry Evan’s work with Willow Garage and Georgia Tech, click this barcode or scan it with your smartphone.

Control: Evans, the company

and the lab are

collaborating on a

project called Robots

for Humanity, aimed at

showing the potential

for personal robots

to assist people with

disabilities.

How a robot can help when your body fails

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqrrxPwBcU4&feature=player_embedded

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Martin Ford is the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm. His book,

“The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Fu-

ture,” explores questions of how accelerating computer technology contributed to the current

global economy and whether more disruptive impacts lie ahead. In a recent opinion piece

for The Washington Post, Ford discussed how IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, could improve

health care. IBM announced in September that it would team up with insurance company

WellPoint to use Watson as a sort of automated clinician’s assistant. In the article, Ford argues

that Watson’s new role in health care could mean big changes in healthcare procedures, costs

and jobs. And the impact of the technology reaches far beyond the world of medicine.

Q: What are some of the benefits Wat-son could bring to health care?

Basically, I think the initial role is going to be sort of a check against mistakes to make sure all options are considered. You can have a doctor put the information in there, and then it can access and assimilate infor-mation all over the place.

I can imagine a time where anytime you see a doctor it will access the system, and that will create a sort of standard for check-ing information to make sure everything’s being considered.

Q: There are popular diagnostic health tools currently available on websites

like WebMD. How does Watson’s decision-making process differ from these simple tools?

The thing about Watson is it’s like on “Jeop-ardy,” where the question can literally come from anywhere, so Watson has to have ac-

old patient histories and things like that. It’s more than just doing an Internet search; it takes it to the next level where you have cognitive involvement of the machine trying to put it together and make sense of things.

Q: While Watson may be an accurate physician, bedside manner is also

very important to patients. What can be done to improve artificial intelligence in this area?

In the near term, one might possibly would be able to create a new level of profession-al, meaning someone who only has a bach-elor or master’s degree that can handle that bedside manner aspect and be an interface for the system, perform exams, work on that personal side without having to go to medi-cal school. It would be a more basic clinical training.

I think that in a field like medicine, if you were really talking about a truly automated doctor, you’d need what we call true artifi-cial intelligence, which lets you think and go beyond what Watson does. That’s a very controversial topic.

Q: What opportunities are there for oth-er hospitals, software companies and

engineers to work together to bring technol-ogy similar to that of Watson to more hos-pitals?

“I think that in a field like

medicine if you were really

talking about a truly automated

doctor, you’d need what we call

true artificial intelligence, which

lets you think and go beyond

what Watson does. That’s a

very controversial topic.”

Elementary diagnosis, Dr. WatsonQ & a

sCan it or Click it:Scan this barcode with your smartphone to see Watson in action on “Jeopardy.”

cess to information from everywhere to cre-ate linkages.

When you apply that to a field like medi-cine, you can enter a more generic ques-tion and it will draw information from dif-ferent fields; it will draw information on

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dr-watson-how-ibms-supercomputer-could-improve-health-care/2011/09/14/gIQAOZQzXK_story.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seNkjYyG3gI


Q & A — continued from Page 27

The most obvious opportunity will be to make the system more affordable, so it can successfully run on less expensive hard-ware. Moore’s Law should help address this issue in time, but there will be plenty of opportunities to optimize the system so it can produce good results on more modest hardware.

Q: How else would Watson’s role in hos-pitals impact health care costs?

It seems likely that Watson will ultimately re-sult in fewer diagnostic errors and a higher probability of optimum treatments being initiated right from the start. That should result in lower overall costs. These benefits may not appear immediately — it may take some time for the technology to establish a track record.

At some point in the further future, if Wat-son comes to be widely accepted as a de-finitive resource, it could offer some protec-tion against malpractice liability if doctors diligently use the system to ensure that all diagnostic and treatment possibilities are considered.

Q: What other unmanned or robotic sys-tems do you see making waves in the

healthcare industry?

Anything that’s routine in a hospital that doesn’t really require a high skill level. In Japan, there’s a lot of effort being put into robots and machines that can assist with the care of older people, that kind of thing. To a certain extent, it’s a matter of social acceptance. Japan has got a very different culture; they view robots in a very positive way, whereas in the United States, not so much.

It’s going to be a question of whether popu-lations of patients will be comfortable in-teracting with the robots in terms of actual care where they actually get touched by the robots and things like that. It may take a little more time. Initially, I think it’s going to be more behind the scenes.

Q: What technological advancements need to be made to proliferate the

use of artificial intelligence and robotics in health care?

I think the technology that interests me the most is really machine learning. I think it’s something that’s really poised to take off and, of course, it’s one of the primary technologies that powers Watson — taking data and historical information in particu-lar. In medicine, you would look at case histories, what was the condition of this patient and what was the diagnosis and what was the eventual outcome, to see if the diagnosis was correct. You have a lot of data there that machines could easily turn through and basically, in essence, program itself to solve similar problems in the future. And that’s something that I think is going to get applied all over the place in the econ-omy, particularly in health care. Watson is just one example.

Q: The healthcare industry has strict pri-vacy requirements. How does the use

of artificial intelligence in the field challenge the ethics of privacy in health care?

I certainly think it’s an issue. I think that ul-timately it’s probably inevitable that we’re going to have to see more information move online. I think in terms of privacy … part of it honestly is the insurance fear in the country. I think it’s a very justified fear on the part of a lot of people. If this infor-mation gets out there, then insurance com-panies are going to use it to discriminate against people. That really has to do with structural problems and insurance and how we do that.

Keeping data secured online is going to be a huge issue for this population because everything’s going online, not just medical information. It’s probably inevitable that we’re going to have to see more informa-tion move online; there’s no running away from it. The answer is not to keep every-thing in paper form.

Q: Do you foresee machines becoming so sophisticated that they might as well

be autonomous, even if they technically are not? What current technological hurdles, if any, stand in the way of this?

I think that in a field like medicine, if you were really talking about a truly automated doctor, you’d need what we call true artifi-cial intelligence, which lets you think and go beyond what Watson does. That’s a very controversial topic. If you talk to peo-ple who are real experts in the field, they’re optimists … like Ray Kurzweil, who is a big proponent of artificial intelligence and something called singularity. That’s maybe 20 years away, and I think that would be a very optimistic view. There are some people with a lot of experience in the field that say that it’s never going to happen. If we get to that point where we can build a machine that can really think like a human being, then all bets are off at that point.

For More information:http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com

http://econfuture.wordpress.com


more [robotic] doctors on the ground to deal with things that are more chronic like diabetes and obesity.”

But the growing use of robotic technology could, in the long run, turn into too much of a good thing, and that’s a bad thing for the human job market. While Ford doesn’t think human beings will ever be completely eliminated from the home and health care industry, “part of the problem is things evolve so quickly,” he says.

“My concern is in the near term, singular-ity … technology is going to go vertical. Things are advancing so rapidly nobody really knows what’s going on. It’s not just a question of technology, it’s a question of economics.”

While the impact of medical robots may only supplement current jobs, the home ro-botics market is forecast to make a huge impact. The International Federation of Ro-botics estimates that since first quarter statis-tics, robot sales have increased 53 percent this year versus 2010.

For 2009, the IFR estimates one million robotic vacuums and 26,000 lawn mow-ing robots were sold. Cleaning robots and medical robots current account for 8 per-cent of the total market. “Mobile platforms for general use” are at 6 percent. They es-timate that the sales value of personal and domestic use robots from 2011-2014 will be $5.4 billion.

Since Jeff Beck, president of iRobot’s home robots division, started at the company two years ago, he estimates they have hired 200 people.

“You can think of those as high-skilled jobs,” he says. They’re technicians, they’re engineers, marketing professionals, sales professionals, financial professionals. Those are really good jobs.”

Doctor/House

Though home and healthcare robots are similar in their forecasted uses — whether aiding people either out

of physical necessity or purely the desire to never vacuum again — the future job markets for each appear to have divergent paths. Though medical robots may simply help patch the bleeding need for more physicians, the personal robotics market is quickly gaining pace.

The days where robots are performing nearly every essential job in a medical setting are far from the present. However, many developed nations are on the cusp of a population shift, where the median age will rise. This issue is so pervasive that the 18 countries that currently don’t have this problem are called “demographic outliers” in a United Nations 2005 Human Develop-ment Report.

Coinciding with this aging population is-sue is a steep decline in people entering the medical profession. Currently only 30 percent of doctors in the United States prac-tice primary care, an area of medicine that, if patients went to consistently, could bring down the overall cost of health care in the United States by $67 billion a year.

A University of Missouri study estimates that the United States could experience a short-age of about 44,000 family practice and general internists over the next 20 years. Compound to that issue is that doctors are also cutting hours back, due to concerns of exhaustion on the job. The Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that average work hours for doctors have decreased from 55 to 51 per week from 1996 to 2008 — the equivalent of losing 36,000 doctors in a decade.

This is where the robots come in.

There is a simple reason that doctors shy away from primary care. Physicians in this field make on average around $170,000

a year, compared to surgeons, who can make upwards of $600,000, according to 2010 statistics from the Medical Ground Management Association.

Currently the lion’s share of medical robots that have been sold are surgical aids, and until technology — not to mention culture — changes to allow wide-scale adoption of autonomous surgical robots, these jobs are likely not in danger.

The need for human interaction in primary care isn’t dwindling either.

FUtUrE JoBs

(Left to right) Martin Ford, author of “The LIghts in the Tunnel,” Michael Lind, policy director for the New America Foundation’s Economic Growth Program, and Tyler Cowen, chair of economics George Mason University and The New York Times columnist, debate how robots will impact future economy at an event in September in Washington, D.C.

On the engineering side, computer engi-neer and author Martin Ford says he sees plenty of job opportunities for engineers and people with the correct technical skills. But he also envisions a new type of health-care job in which workers would serve as an interface for medical robotics systems. Employee and robot would work together to jointly perform the role of a traditional doctor.

“We have to acknowledge we’re going to have a shortage of primary care physi-cians,” Ford says. “Most doctors want to specialize in a field that’s very lucrative. We may have a situation where we need

http://newamerica.net/events/2011/will_robots_steal_your_job

1995

1990

1985

A stitch in timeThe beginnings of the robotic surgery business found two companies pitted against each other for market dominance. After years of closely following one another in achievements and a series of patent lawsuits, Computer Motion and Intuitive Surgical Inc. found a creative solution to their problem.

tiMElinE

Also created by Computer Motion, the Zeus Robotic Surgical System, a three-armed device attached to the side of an operating table, is demonstrated.

1995

Computer Motion, an emerging robotic surgery company, is founded in Goleta, Calif.

1989

Aesop 1000, the first robotic surgery product by company Computer Mo-tion, is created. Much like a third arm for a surgeon, the robot can hold an endoscopic camera during laparoscop-ic surgery, an incision type that uses a small keyhole-sized entry point. It is the first robotic surgical aid to gain FDA certification.

1993

The Stanford Research Institute International gets funding by DARPA to work on a robotic surgery system capable of op-erating remotely on soldiers on the battlefield.

1990


1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 20202030

1990

2025 Computer Motion sues Intuitive Surgical on eight counts of pat-ent infringement.

2000

As a solution to the lawsuit, Computer Motion and Intuitive Surgical merge and phase out the ZEUS robotic system. The companies agree to headquarter in Sunnyvale, Calif., the location of Intui-tive Surgical.

2003

Zeus gains FDA approval.

2001

The Leipzig Heart Centre in Ger-many performs the first roboti-cally assisted heart bypass sur-gery using the da Vinci Surgical System.

1998

The da Vinci Surgical Sys-tem, by Intuitive Surgical, a company formed out of the Stanford Research Institute International, gains FDA approval. Originally called Lenny, the system’s 3-D imag-ing ability earns it a unique spot in the emerging field of robotic surgery.

1997

Computer Motion releases the Aesop 2000 model, with added voice control.

1996

The Zeus robotic system performs the first fallo-pian tube reconnection surgery as a part of a clinical trial at the Cleve-land Clinic.

1998 The FDA approves the da Vinci system for pros-tate surgery.

2001


I

BySTEPHANIELEVy

magine: You walk into a hospital and an automated computer system

checks you in for care. After being escorted to a nearby room, a robot rolls through the door, with your doctor’s face smiling on a small television screen. After a brief consul-tation, your doctor decides you need medi-cine.

You then walk to the hospital pharmacy, where another robot accurately fills your prescription. An automated computer sys-tem accesses your insurance information to make sure the medication is properly paid for — and you could almost swear you’ve seen that robot on “Jeopardy.” If you re-quire surgery, nurses send you to an oper-ating room where a robotic surgical system

completes your surgery in less time than a conventional surgical procedure and has you out the door to a faster recovery. Af-ter your surgery, another robot collects any leftover trash from the emergency room and delivers it to the dumpsters.

This may sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie, but in fact it shows a growing trend in hospitals. Through remote consultations, autonomous surgeries and high-speed hospital administration, experts say the in-creased use of unmanned systems in health care actually brings patients closer to their doctors.

“Robot capabilities are getting better and better every year,” says InTouch Health Ex-ecutive Vice President Steve Jordan. “We have a lot more that we’re capable of do-ing. The next 10 to 20 years are going to bring amazing things.”

Marching ordersMuch of the robotic technology in hospitals today originated from military objectives. Military physicians and engineers “shot at the heart, but they hit the prostate,” says

Dr. Vipur R. Patel, associate professor of urology at the University of Central Flori-da. The first robotic surgery systems were developed with the goal of being used in theater for cardiac surgery but were large-ly unsuccessful. However, they proved to have benefits for prostate surgery.

“The prostate is a confined space in the pelvis that’s very difficult to do laparoscopi-cally [done with a small camera through a small abdominal incision], but with the robot you have the illumination, magnifica-tion, and very delicate, small instruments that let us operate in a confined field,” Pa-tel says.

This year, Patel’s hospital received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to help develop telepresence sur-gery. The technologies could have applica-tions in far-ranging environments, from the battlefield to outer space.

“If you had a robot that could stabilize [pa-tients] after the initial injury, the chance of survival is much higher,” Patel says. “As they look forward to the space stations and so forth, they realized some sort of remote surgery is very important.”

Anatomy

Just what the doctor ordered: a robotic presence in the E.R. assists with surgery. Photo courtesy InTouch Health.

Unmanned systems play a growing role in health care

of a robotic hospital


The military has also developed robotic sys-tems to help amputees coming home from service. Since 2003, more than 1,100 sol-diers have had a limb amputated during service in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spent $100 million to develop a robotic arm that users can control through a chip implanted in their brain. Virginia-based Alion Science and Technology de-veloped the 3-D model for the robotic limb based on ultrasound images.

Using a syringe, doctors will be able to im-plant wireless sensors into a patient’s arm to optimize control of a prosthetic. This will also require doctors to find working nerves and muscles they can integrate from the in-jury itself.

Paging Dr. WatsonSome of the robots now being used in hos-pitals got their start on a more public plat-form. In September 2011, IBM announced a partnership with WellPoint Inc. to bring its Watson computer system to “serve as a clinician’s assistant,” says Christine Vu of IBM’s research department.

Watson can sift through much more infor-mation much more quickly than a human doctor and can present it in a way that a physician can use to recommend the best course of action. IBM experts say having Watson evaluate medical data could pre-vent the flaw of availability, where doctors start to prematurely formulate a diagnosis after briefly talking to a patient.

“It’s amazing,” says Martin Ford, computer engineer and author of “The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technol-ogy and the Economy of the Future.”

“It goes far beyond what any one person would be able to do. Making sense of that [machine learning], that’s probably going to ensure that a lot of things that fall through the cracks are going to be considered in the diagnosis. My hope for it is that it’s going to evolve into something pretty standard.”

Ford, who has not worked on Watson him-self, says doctors at first will likely be re-luctant to rely on Watson too much. Over time, the autonomous system will build a track record of information gathering and diagnostic assessment.

Read more from Martin Ford about Watson in Q&A on Page 27.

Wired for careThe primary use of robotic surgery systems, like Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical System, in urology is for treating prostate cancer. Patel says 80 percent of prostatec-tomies in the United States are done with the use of a robot. He says much of the in-crease is due to patient preference.

“They want to have robotic surgery,” Patel says. “It’s based upon the outcomes that are being published.”

By using tiny incisions during surgery, the robot allows for less blood loss during sur-gery and faster patient recovery. Da Vinci and other robotic surgery platforms provide surgeons with enhanced vision, precision, control and dexterity.

“It has instrumentation, so we have seven degrees of freedom,” Patel says. “It looks like you’re inside of the patient when you’re operating.”

Robots are now more commonly being used for surgical procedures in gynecology and general surgery. Approximately half of all myomectomies, the surgical removal of fibroid tumors in the uterus, are performed with a da Vinci robot. General surgery uses

Watson, powered by IBM POWER7, is a workload-opti-mized system that can answer questions posed in natural language over a nearly unlimited range of knowledge. Photo courtesy IBM.


Medical Update — continued from Page 33

extend from colorectal cancer, the third most deadly cancer worldwide, to obesity, which affects 72 million people in the U.S. alone. The demand is huge.

“All hospitals these days will have a large volume of prostate cancer procedures or gynecological procedures with a robot,” Patel says. “A lot of the procedural prob-lems have gone away.”

In cardiology, da Vinci is commonly used to treat mitral valve prolapse, when a heart valve does not properly seal, and coronary artery disease, a narrowing of the blood vessels that supply the heart. Cardiac pa-tients who choose da Vinci surgery to re-pair their mitral valve have an average in-

hospital recovery time of three to four days, as opposed to up to two weeks with tradi-tional surgery. For chest-area procedures, the da Vinci surgical robot eliminates the need for a sternotomy (an 8- to 10-inch incision through the breastbone), making patient recovery faster and hospital stays shorter.

InTouch Health uses its RP-7 robots to as-sist stroke patients in rural areas, because the technology allows doctors to lend them-selves to remote hospitals and patients as needed. Jordan says this is especially help-ful, because the number of stroke specialists is declining.

“By using our technology, we can have a

specialist that might be located, let’s say, in an urban setting, in a hospital there that has a number of specialists,” Jordan says. “Their expertise can be available at these remote and rural hospitals.”

Still, many of the benefits of robotic surgery come from the manned side of the opera-tion. The basic learning curve for a physi-cian using a robot during surgery is about 50 cases, making experience the No. 1 predictor of the outcome of surgery.

“Autonomy can be applied at very different levels with very different behaviors,” Jordan says. “The trick is to apply that appropri-ately so that the safety and the efficacy are appropriate for what you’re trying to ac-complish.”

It seems robotic surgical systems have no-where to go but up as the demand for doc-tors grows, especially in primary care. As more and more physicians look to lucrative specializations and big-city hospitals for employment, patients with chronic condi-tions such as diabetes or obesity get left in the lurch. Ford acknowledges there is a serious problem of physician shortages in rural areas and less glamorous fields of medicine.

This could lead to a new type of relationship between robots and healthcare workers in which automated systems are responsible for much of the diagnostic and procedural work in patient care, while a person is still involved with the more “human” aspects of health care like bedside manner.

“You already see that to some extent with nurse practitioners, but of course we also have a shortage of nurses,” Ford says. “So I think there’s an opportunity for another type of professional that’s maybe specifi-cally trained to work with these diagnostic systems, and they might still operate under the division of doctors.”

On the procedural side, robots are highly involved in routine hospital work. These sys-tems make deliveries within hospitals and

Doctors test robotic surgical equipment on the show floor at the American Urological Association conference in Washington, D.C. Robots play a role in the majority of prostate removal surgeries. Photo by Stephanie Levy.


dispense prescriptions in pharmacies. Ford says he expects robots to primarily work in these behind-the-scenes roles in the near future.

“In the long run, if you look really far into the future, it’s possible to imagine a real artificial doctor, but I don’t think we’re any-where close to that now,” Ford says.

Doctors without bordersTelemedical robots — systems that allow physicians to remotely access patients through a video and audio interface device — offer another level of personal care to patients in situations or areas where per-sonal interaction is not possible.

“To [specialists] it’s taking and elevating the quality of care and access to care to lev-els that are unmatched,” Jonathan Bailey, administrative director for neurosciences services at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said in a February 2010

interview with AUVSI. Wake Forest has leased two of InTouch Health’s RP-7 robots for stroke patients.

The RP-7 robot works ideally for stroke pa-tients because it can administer thrombolic drugs, which treat blood clots, within a rap-id time window. Also, it is easier to move a robotic system from one patient to another, rather than moving the patient from hospital to hospital for care; this cuts down on the hospital’s transport costs.

InTouch Health has purpose-built-in points for all its telepresence robots. Its robotic system for hospitals differs in size and form factors from an ambulance bot that can be

hooked up to a gurney next to the patient.

In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, 11 hospitals already use telepresence robots for consul-tations between doctors and patients. The interface allows doctors to use digital im-ages and face-to-face interactions with pa-tients to help with everything from routine checkups to making crisis health decisions. For more immediate care, the robot also has a special stethoscope that allows the doctor to remotely hear a patient’s heart-beat.

But there is a long way to go between the exam room and the emergency room.

“Telepresence surgery is something that’s not real yet, but the remote surgery is some-thing that we’re working on,” Patel says.

Patel says the next step in making robotic telepresence surgery a reality is to integrate imaging systems during surgery. Integration would help doctors be able to see where a patient’s cancer or injury is in relation to the surrounding nerve bundles.

Once telepresence becomes a reality for surgery, there will still be a role for doc-tors to play. Jordan says the surgeon should still be able to make the final call in these patient settings.

“We found that people are very open mind-ed to robots,” Jordan says. “People are very embracing of it, and they feel, ‘Wow, I’m getting the best care. This is the best technology, and they’re using it to make my care better.’”

Stephanie Levy is associate editor of Mis-sion Critical.

A doctor makes his rounds to remote patients via telepresence technology. Photo courtesy InTouch Health.

For More information:http://www.intouchhealth.comhttp://www.davincisurgery.com


head or eyes are moving in an unnatural way.

Other researchers in Japan and Hungary teamed up to study how people responded to cartoonish robot faces to try to gauge a robot’s emotion. Designers from the Osaka Institute of Technology and the Moholy-Na-gy University of Art and Design in Budapest devised a series of faces, some with sad eyes and happy mouths, some the other way around. What they learned is that where some humans stand depends on where they sit.

“Japanese weighed facial cues more heav-ily in the eye regions than Hungarians, who weighed facial cues more heavily in the mouth region that Japanese,” they discov-ered.

The design of the robots also plays a role.

short informational statement of less than three minutes.

So, as part of the experiment, subjects in-terfaced with a humanlike robot that talked like a machine, a humanlike robot that talked like a human, a machine-like robot that talked like a machine or a machine-like robot that talked like a human.

The results were mixed. The subjects tended to gather more information from the human-like robot, but that could be offset if it used the robotic voice.

“Results suggest that both the robots’ behav-ior and appearance are important but, if they are contradictory, the robots’ behavior is more powerful than the robot’s appear-ance in the perception of the robot as more machine-like or human-like,” the research-ers said in a paper.

UnCannY VallEY

The term uncanny valley was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, who postulated that robots can

become eerie if they come close to look-ing like actual humans but miss the mark in small ways. Up to a point, human-like robots are more familiar, but imperfections like rubbery skin or crossed eyes can make them seem creepy and cause actual hu-mans to feel revulsion.

Having creepy robots may not matter in some fields, but in the area of service ro-bots, including for health care and home care, people need to trust their robots, not be afraid of them.

Researchers around the globe — but par-ticularly in Japan — are looking at ways to fend off the uncanny valley as robots adopt increasingly human-like behaviors and ap-pearances.

How to prevent a creepy service bot

“Results suggest that both the robots’ behavior and appearance are important but, if they are contradictory, the robots’ behavior is more

powerful than the robot’s appearance in the perception of the robot as more machine-like or human-like.”

No detail is too small. Researchers at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan studied ways to improve the eye and head movements of humanlike androids, particularly ones that could serve as recep-tionists for businesses. Such movements are important, because the androids sometimes need to direct human attention in a particu-lar way, such as by showing them where a door is located, but they can’t do that if the human is staring at them because their

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul studied the way people reacted to machine-like robots versus more human-like ones — in this case, Aldebaran Robot-ics’ diminutive Nao robot. The researchers also examined the way the robots spoke, not just how they looked. One robot used a message recorded by a human radio actor; the other used a file recorded by a text-to-speech program. In both cases, the robots said exactly the same thing, delivering a

Crossing the valleyExamples of not-quite-there robots abound. Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka Uni-versity is famous for building Geminoid, a humanoid robot that looks just like him. That has since expanded into several semi-lifelike robots, manufactured by Japan’s Kokoro Co., which builds robotic dinosaurs and rents out “Actroids,” human-like female robots that can serve as restaurant greeters or office assistants.


The National Taiwan University of Science and Technology’s musical robot head, which can learn a piece of music by sight in a matter of seconds. Photo courtesy the NTUST.

Ishiguro says that one day people could communicate remotely using their robot doubles, using them like sophisticated cell phones.

Scientists at the National Taiwan Univer-sity of Science and Technology recently un-veiled a singing robotic head that can read music and react to facial expressions.

“Robots with various human-like facial ex-pressions and conversation capabilities are useful for attracting attention from human beings and, therefore, are especially suit-able for applications involving robot and human interaction,” Chyi-Yeu Lin and his researchers wrote in a paper.

Although he wrote later in the paper that “people love robots and they like to watch performances of these robots,” many Inter-net reactions were less kind. One website described the singing, rubbery head as “creepy” and another described it as “a melodious abomination.”

Austrian researchers at the University of Salzburg recently undertook an investiga-tion of what people would like to see in a service robot, particularly one designed to operate in a public space.

They had assumed that respondents would prefer an anthropomorphic robot design, but that was not the case.

“In contrast to our assumptions, the results showed that the participants did not prefer a merely anthropomorphic design for an in-teractive urban robot, but a combination of anthropomorphic and functional elements,” they wrote in a paper. “Human cues like eyes and a mouth turned out to be essential in the imagination of these potential users in order to know how to interact with a ro-bot.”

The end result — which the researchers said needs more fine tuning — turned out to be a one-armed cat-like robot riding on a wheel.

sCan it or Click it:To see a video of three Geminoid robots in action, scan this barcode with your smartphone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J71XWkh80nc


One of the United Kingdom’s larg-est health authorities may install a fleet of robotic automatic guid-

ed vehicles, or AGVs, following the suc-cessful introduction of a U.S.-built system by another British authority last year.

In August 2010, Forth Valley Royal Hospi-tal in Larbert, Stirlingshire, became the first hospital in Britain to use AGVs to automati-cally retrieve and deliver a wide range of supplies.

The move by NHS Forth Valley has proven so successful that the neighboring Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board told Mis-sion Critical that it is considering introduc-ing a fleet at a planned new major hospital in Glasgow.

The ATLIS forklift-type vehicles — designed and built in the U.K. by the European op-eration of the American company JBT Corp. — are being used at Forth Valley as hospi-tal porters to carry bed linens, meals, clini-cal waste and medical supplies in corridors separated from the facility’s public areas. Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board confirmed that it is interested in introducing a similar system at its 800 million pound ($1.27 billion) New Southern General Hos-pital, which is currently under construction and is due to open in 2014.

A spokeswoman said, “We have visited Forth Valley hospital to look at their AGV equipment as we want to find the best sys-tems we can for the hospital. We have also

viewed different systems at a couple of oth-er sites in the U.K. to see what they offer, but no decisions have been taken yet.”

The current 13-strong fleet at Forth Valley — which cost 1.2 million pounds ($1.9 mil-lion) to install — has proven very successful since its introduction a year ago, according

tEstinG, tEstinG

Robots gaining popularity in UK hospitalsNew Glasgow hospital could follow Forth Valley’s AGV lead

Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Stirlingshire.

One of the ATLIS robots at Forth Valley porters waste. Photo courtesy JBT Corp.

ByMAgNUSBENNETT


Robots at Forth Valley cater to patient needs without getting in the way. Photo courtesy JBT Corp.

to international service company Serco.

Mike MacKay, Serco’s contract director at Forth Valley, said the system should pay it-self off over three years.

He explained, “I am very satisfied with the system as a whole. I think it does exactly what it says on the tin. We are making savings in terms of labor costs as we have been able to free up porters to undertake other tasks and focus more on patient care. No jobs have been lost as a result of their introduction and the unions are fully behind the project. There is also the benefit of re-ducing the chances of spreading infection as they operate behind the scenes.”

Existing on-site engineers, in tandem with JBT Corp. specialists, are carrying out maintenance of the vehicles.

The automatic vehicles use laser navigation technology to find their way around the fa-cility and are equipped with front and rear electronic obstacle detection bumpers to prevent collisions.

The forks of the ATLIS are equipped with an electric lift which picks up supply carts from the floor and delivers the carts to the intended destination. After arrival, the forks lower so that the supply cart is returned to the floor and the ATLIS vehicle can proceed on to its next delivery task in another area of the hospital.

The vehicles carry out a series of tasks until their battery levels drop to 60 percent of full capacity, when they send a signal out to op-erators that they are signing out. They then automatically return to a specially designed plate for recharging.

MacKay confirmed that several health au-thorities had expressed interest in the sys-tem but added that not every existing health facility was suited to the AGVs.

He added, “If I were asked if the robotic system could be put into a older building, I would say definitely not. The Forth Valley hospital is new and was designed to ac-commodate a robotic system with plenty of elevators, corridors and space for them to

operate behind the scenes. Older hospitals tend not to have that, and you can’t have AGVs moving around corridors in close proximity to the public or patients — there would be a risk of spreading infection as well as the possibility of accidents.”

Meanwhile, NHS Forth Valley reported an-other robotic success story at its new hos-pital, which first started treating patients a year ago and was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in July of this year.

Senior staff has praised the fully automated robotic pharmacy, which stores, retrieves and labels a wide range of drugs and medicines.

Managers at the hospital said the 400,000 pound ($635,000) pharmacy had slashed nearly 700,000 pounds ($1.1 million) off

the hospital’s drugs bill over the past year by reducing the amount of stock required at the facility. They also said the system, which selects chosen drugs by reading barcodes on medicine packets, had reduced dispens-ing errors.

Lead pharmacist Jann Davidson said she was very pleased with the system, which was produced by pharmacy automation specialists ARX.

She commented, “Not only have we been able to reduce our stock levels, but we have also halved prescription turnaround time from four to two hours and full medicine reconciliation at point of admission for 80 percent of patients within 24 hours.”


From humanoid helpers to interactive media, household robotics has been a mainstay of science fiction and fu-

turistic pop culture. Though depicted in a variety of ways, there is one common theme running through the few TV shows, movies and books the Mission Critical staff chose here: People really need a robot to get them out of bed and make them coffee and breakfast in the morning. Robot makers, take note.

wife, Mildred, who embodies the current state of affairs, constantly drowning out her own thoughts through wall-sized televisions and pill popping.

A common scene to anyone walking down the street in a city, Mildred usually drowns out Guy by keeping a Seashell radio ear-piece in her ear, much like modern ear buds or Bluetooth headsets.

When Mildred eventually overdoses on

Domotic dramaPoP CUltUrE CornEr

was a tablet device that let them make their media and chat features mobile. They also had a robotic vacuum cleaner.

Named the 14th best robot of all time by pop culture magazine Paste in a 2011 poll, Rosie, the Jetsons’ housekeeper robot, re-mains one of the most popular depictions of how robots could be fully integrated with families in the future.

“The Jetsons” actually predicted quite a few technologies that are standard home features now. They watched television on flatscreens and used a video chat feature, a lot like Skype, to com-

municate. A few episodes depicted a “TeleViewer,” which was a tablet device that let them make their media and chat features mobile. They also had a robotic vacuum cleaner.

‘The Jetsons’Perhaps the most relevant pop culture imag-ining of what future living could look like was embodied in the characters and gad-gets in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, “The Jetsons.”

Originally released in 1962, “The Jetsons” depicts typical family life in 2062 with high tech home features that often go awry. Each day, George Jetson, the father figure, gets ready for work by moving through a con-veyor belt system that showers, dresses and brushes his teeth for him, and Jane Jetson, the mom, can create breakfast at a push of a button.

“The Jetsons” actually predicted quite a few technologies that are standard home features now. They watched television on flatscreens and used a video chat feature, a lot like Skype, to communicate. A few episodes depicted a “TeleViewer,” which

‘Wall-E’Relegated to a spaceship after abandoning a trash-covered Earth in 2085, the humans in the Pixar movie Wall-E live on a smart ship full of creature comforts.

Due to lack of gravity combined with severe bone loss, all humans turn into morbidly obese couch potatoes thanks to their per-sonal hover chairs that keep them constant-ly occupied with video chats and the latest “cupcake-in-a-cup” trend as nourishment.

‘Fahrenheit 451’A book about a dystopian anti-intellectual future, society has abandoned — and has started burning — literature and instead fo-cuses on mind-numbing non-stop electronic entertainment. Hmm … sounds familiar.

Guy Montag, the novel’s protagonist, is a firefighter, and thus a book burner, who is starting to question his way of life. It’s his

sleeping pills, an automated blood transfu-sion machine filters in new blood to keep her alive. Other automated features of Guy’s house include a spider-like hand that autonomously makes toast dripping with melted butter.

Guy finds a confidante in Faber, a former English professor that is against the totalitar-ian state but is too fearful to act against it. In one scene, Faber reveals to Guy a small tablet television device that he occasionally watches instead of the popular wall-to-wall TVs.

“I always wanted something very small, something I could talk to, something I could blot out with the palm of my hand if neces-sary,” he says to Guy. “Nothing that could shout me down, nothing monstrous big.”

Ironic to say the least, Universal Pictures made a movie of the book 15 years after its release, and in 1986 it was turned into a video game.


‘The Stepford Wives’First a 1972 book and then made and re-made into movies in 1975 and 2004, “The Stepford Wives” is a satirical look at the subservient status of women in the town Stepford, Conn.

New-to-town New York City photographer Joanna Eberhart is perplexed by the women of Stepford, who are always perfect in ap-pearance and are at their husbands’ beck and call. The women delight in grocery shopping, cooking and household chores.

Joanna becomes convinced that the house-wives are actually robots, created to perfec-tion in the Stepford men’s club.

In a jarring scene near the end of the 1975 version of the movie, Joanna is coerced into robotic wife Bobbie’s house, a formerly smart women that suddenly turned vapid since moving to Stepford. Bobbie offers to perk her up with coffee instead of worry-ing about her missing children. Joanna cuts her own hand and then stabs Bobbie, who doesn’t bleed, proving she is a robot. Bob-bie grabs the knife out of her hip and puts it back in place, all the while stuck in an eerie speech loop, “How could you do a thing like that? I was just going to give you coffee. I thought we were friends.”

Later in the men’s club, Joanna finds her own robot duplicate, which, the film sug-gests, kills Joanna. The robot continues on in her place, grocery shopping to its heart’s content.

‘Surrogates’There have also been several movies and books about the use of telepresence robots to expand human experience. In the 2009 thriller “Surrogates,” Bruce Willis must in-vestigate a murder in a time when people stay home and only interact through robotic versions of themselves, versions that are better than the originals. The movie’s tag-line is “Human perfection. What could go wrong?”

Image copyright iStockphoto.com/FlossArts

sCan it or Click it:Scan this barcode with your smartphone to see a classic scene from the 1975 version of “The Stepford Wives.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5DSJUhH-SY


Personal robotics in many ways mir-rors how personal computing was perceived 30 years ago, loaded with

potential but missing a real application.

“I think what’s missing right now is the key application, the thing that the robot does that’s just so valuable that people will go out and buy one to have it in their house,” says Brian Gerkey, director of open source development for Willow Garage.

For computing, Gerkey says the tipping point was the spreadsheet, which made personal computers essential in the work-force. What that application may be in ro-botics, though, still remains to be seen.

Though home and healthcare robotics use is on the rise, like all types of robotics, stan-dardization is key to acceptance. There are currently standards for industrial robots, dictated by the International Organization for Standardization’s Technical Committee 184, which works on automation systems and integration but none for robotics that will work with people in a healthcare set-ting.

Willow Garage aims to increase up-and-coming companies’ creative freedom by fo-cusing on its Robot Operating System open-source software, which could make Willow Garage robots one day the iPhone to a ro-boticist’s app — a device that’s ubiquitous on its own but, through other closed-source software standing on Willow Garage’s shoulders, becomes endlessly functional.

“[It’s] this idea that I can buy this device and it does something useful out of the box, but it’s extensible,” says Gerkey. “I can, down the road, install new apps on it that give it new functionality. And also my friends who develop something new for their robot, there’s a path to get that functionality on my robot. They can just upload their app to the robot app store, and I can download it on my robot. “

“These guidelines are not merely a list of desirable features, but, rather, they consti-tute an essential set of features that must be incorporated in telepresence robots,” Munjal Desai, Katherine Tsui and Holly A. Yanco wrote.

Researchers concluded that telepresence robots need:

• Dynamic video, high resolution enough to drive the robot, but the video stream must also self-adjust to fluctuations in the network connection. Participants in the study were “willing to sacrifice the resolution, color depth and contrast of the incoming video feed for dynamic characteristics like low latency and higher frame rates.”

• High-quality audio, at least as good as a landline telephone conversation, and volume controls that can adjust for different work spaces

• A platform-independent user interface

• Adjustable height

• Multiple cameras and a pan-and-tilt head

• Autonomous behaviors that can take some of the burden off the robot op-erator, but which can be over ridden as needed.

Again, standards may be the key to suc-cess.

“Before telepresence robots are widely available, the specifications for these ro-bots will need to be standardized,” they concluded. “Standards pertaining to priva-cy and security must be established. Also, standardizing robot operations systems and communication protocols will help improve interoperability between robots.”

Building the better robot will take standards — and freedom tECHnoloGY GaP

For the do-it-yourselfers out there, the com-pany has its TurtleBot, a relatively cheap platform that can be hacked through an Xbox Kinect to perform any number of tasks.

One day a company with a transformative idea could create its own proprietary soft-ware that sits atop the company’s ROS and hit it big with robotics.

“The reason that we designed the Turtle-Bot is we wanted to get more robots into people’s hands,” says Gerkey. “The Turtle-Bot … is intended to be an application de-veloper’s platform. People who have good ideas for what robots should be used for, the TurtleBot is something that if you are reasonably motivated, you could imaging spending a couple thousand dollars on this robot, which is fully programmable.”

Companies could then use the TurtleBot as just the prototype for their system to start up a business.

“You could get one of these and maybe you put an inexpensive servo-based arm on it and you work on it in your garage, and you get all the kinks worked out, you put together a business case and start a com-pany,” Gerkey says.

The fashionable telepresence robotResearchers from the University of Massa-chusetts Lowell put two telepresence robots through their paces at various Google of-fices last year [For more information, see the feature story on telepresence robotics on Page 20].

In so doing, they developed a series of recommendations for developers of such robots to make them more useful and there-fore more likely to be accepted in the work-place.

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When Dr. Ronan Lev was a resi-dent at Washington Univer-sity School of Medicine in St.

Louis, robotic surgical systems were making their debut on hospital floors.

Already, Lev had seen urological surgeries like prostatectomies evolve from an open procedure to one that could be done lapa-roscopically, or with the use of a camera through a small abdominal incision. With the transition to laparoscopy, “the only thing that was very significantly different was the surgeon’s experience was so much more important, because physicians who could do the open procedure couldn’t nec-essarily do the laparoscopic procedure,” Lev says. But the transition to robotics was, and still is, different.

“The minute we had access to the robot is when we started to work on the robot,” he says. “When you compare the new tech-nologies, besides trying to push new tech-nology, they’ve always tried to push for an improvement in some parameter, either patient outcome, hospital stays, decreased blood loss, things like that.”

Now, seven years out of residency, Lev and two other doctors at St. Louis Urological Surgeons use the da Vinci robot for pros-tatectomies, as well as surgeries to recon-struct the renal pelvis, a funnel-like area that guides urine out of the kidneys into the tubes that deliver it to the bladder. This is his second year working with the machine.

“The technological issue of learning how to work the robot, that’s really easy,” Lev says. “One of the things [doctors] found was the ability to do the procedure was a lot easier than doing a laparoscopic prostatectomy. It was a lot easier for physicians who do open prostatectomy to go straight into the robotic with less laparoscopic experience.”

It became quickly apparent that using a robot for prostate surgery reduced blood

loss during the procedure. In a traditional open prostatectomy, a patient can lose up to a liter of blood, one-fifth of the average amount of blood in an adult. Robotic sur-gery mitigates the problem by giving the surgeon a better view through a camera. The doctor doesn’t have to feel inside the abdomen, and possibly cause bleeding, to find the prostate. Lev says it’s also possible in the future for robotic surgery to make it easier to avoid damaging vital nerves dur-ing surgery.

The hands of da Vinci

up a patient after surgery, much easier. A surgeon makes an intuitive swooping mo-tion, and the robot can emulate this motion as if it were a traditional open prostatec-tomy procedure. The robot also allows the surgeon to scale motion, translating a six-inch motion by the doctor to a half-inch stitch on the patient.

Switching to robotic surgery also changed the learning curve for doctors to adopt new techniques and procedures. Lev says it took 15 to 20 cases to acclimate himself to the robot, but there’s always something new to learn about the system. For instance, in the last six months, the way surgeons re-constructs hollow tissue like blood vessels, called anastomosis,was changed with the help of a robotic surgical system.

“Because this is a new technology, things are changing, instruments are changing, and people that are leaders in the robotics [industry], they change the techniques,” Lev says. “Over time as people present their dif-ferent techniques, you have to emulate them in order to get better results.”

But robotic surgical systems have yet to cut costs. It costs a hospital $1 million to buy a surgical robot, and then annual upkeep can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And surgeons are reimbursed at about the same rate, whether they’re using the robot or not.

“Cost effectiveness is a huge issue,” Lev says. “A lot of people say it’s not very cost effective because it’s very, very expensive. But a lot of proponents would say this is a technology that’s in its infancy and it’s just going to get better and better.”

“People are going to get better at using it, and they’re going to find more uses for it because it’s a brand new tool.”

EnD UsErs

Dr. Ronan Lev

“The huge advantage of the robotic proce-dure is the robot allows the laparoscopic instrument to imitate your hand,” Lev says. “It has nine degrees of freedom. It can go up, down, left, right [and] turn. It can do everything that your wrist can do, which in a straight laparoscopy wouldn’t occur.”

This human-like motion can make tasks that require fine-tuned motion, such as sewing

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VOLUME 28 NO.6 • JUNE 2010

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ROBOTICS WEEK U.K. TECH

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Robots

Helping

Robots

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Robots

Helping

Robots

Mission Critical, Fall 2011

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Transcript of Mission Critical, Fall 2011