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July 01 2011
Coming to a Dental School Near You: The Dental Robot With the Sex-Doll Face
Good news dental students: soon you will no longer have to approach your first victim patient with shaky, unsure hands. Researchers at Showa University in Japan have unveiled a new dental dummy, a realistic robot for dental students to practice on before taking the drill to real, human mouths.
I use the term “dummy” here loosely. Showa Tanako 2, as the researchers call her, has a wide range of human-like features. She can engage in simple conversations, flinch, roll her eyes, cough, and close her mouth like a real patient suffering from jaw fatigue. Oh, and she has a gag reflex.
So how did a group of dental researchers build such a realistic—albeit slightly scary—looking robot? Naturally, they sought help from Japanese sex doll maker, Orient Industry, who helped fashion the robot’s skin, tongue, and mouth. If the doll’s face didn’t look realistic, it wouldn’t “have the same effect on users psychologically,” Showa University professor Koutaro Maki said in the video released by DigInfo. “How doctors and students actually feel in the presence of a patient is a really big factor.”
On top of her movements, speech, and look, Showa Tanako 2 has one final similarity to human patients: she judges. ...
November 11 2010
Your Next Sponge Bath May Come From a Robot Named Cody
A team at Georgia Tech is looking to replace your sponge bath nurse with this sexy beast to the right. No, not the girl. The sponge bath robot next to her, named Cody. He’s the one that wants to wipe you down with his delicate towel hands.
The robot was developed by researcher Charles Kemp’s team at the Healthcare Robotics Lab, and was described in a presentation and accompanying paper (pdf) at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
The robot uses cameras and lasers to evaluate the human’s body, identifying dirty spots, then gently wipes with its towel hands, making sure not to apply too much or too little pressure. It has flexible arm joints with low levels of stiffness to make sure that it doesn’t push too hard.
Study coauthor Chih-Hung (Aaron) King put himself in the tester’s spot for the robot’s first rubs. He relived the experience for Hizook:
“As the sole subject in this initial experiment, I’d like to share my impressions of the interaction. In the beginning I felt a bit tense, but never scared. As the experiment progressed, my trust in the robot grew and my tension waned. Throughout the experiment, I suffered little-to-no discomfort.”
Hit the jump for a video of the bot rubbing on King:
An interesting note about robots performing this kind of task: They are the ones that initiate human-robot contact. It may not seem like a big deal, but being in the receiving position of a robot-induced sponge bath might be a little unnerving, King explained to Hizook:
“The tasks performed in this experiment involved the robot initiating and actively making contact with a human. This differs from most (current) research on human-robot contact, which is initiated by humans rather than robots. It would be interesting to study how the general population, specifically patients, would react to such robot-initiated contact. Indeed, the psychological impact of robot-initiated contact may become important for future human-robot interaction (HRI) research.”
Meanwhile, we can’t make up our minds: Would it be more unnerving having Cody wipe you down than it would be embarrassing to have a human nurse or loved one do it?
Related content:
Discoblog: Robot, Build Thyself: Machine Made of Lego Builds Models Made of Lego
Discoblog: Helpful Robot Can Play With Your Socks
Discoblog: Origami Robot: Don’t Bother, I’ll Fold Myself
Discoblog: Punching Robot Totally Breaks Asimov’s First Rule
80Beats: A Robot With Beanbag Hands Learns the Gentle Touch
DISCOVER: The Robot Invasion Is Coming—and That’s a Good Thing
Image: Travis Deyle/Hizook Video: Georgia Tech Health Robotics Lab
October 05 2010
It’s a Rat! It’s a Toy Car! It’s RatCar?
While this contraption looks similar to a doggy wheelchair or a pair of prosthetic legs for your favorite pet, it’s actually much more sophisticated. This rat is hooked up to a prototype of a thought-guided robot wheelchair.
The robot-rat setup, known as Ratcar, is guided by transmissions from the rat through mini-electrodes implanted in its brain.
The animal-robot hybrid was developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo, who explained its purpose to IEEE Spectrum:
“We wanted to develop a brain-machine interface system aiming for future wheelchairs that paralyzed patients can control only with thought,” says Osamu Fukayama of the university’s Medical Engineering and Life Science Laboratory. “RatCar is a simplified prototype to develop better electrodes, devices, and algorithms for those systems.”
The researchers first implanted electrodes in the motor cortex of each rat’s brain, and then trained it to tow the contraption around while the motor was turned off. Next the rat was suspended beneath the car so that it could only lightly touch the ground, and couldn’t actually move the robo-car with its limbs. Then the car was switched to brain-reading mode and researchers watched to see if the rat could control the car’s movements with only the pulses from its motor cortex.
The researchers said that six out of the eight rats tested in this fashion were able to adjust well to the mind-controlled car, though they aren’t sure how much of the movement was due to the rat’s specific intentions, Fukayama explained to IEEE Spectrum:
Since the rat would be forcibly moved along with the car, measuring its real intentions became a challenging problem. Another difficulty was that only a small percentage of the electrodes actually recorded neural activity, and the recorded neurons didn’t necessarily correlate with target movements.
Improvements to the technology and science of brain reading could lead to more thought-controlled contraptions, including wheelchairs and limbs, which would be useful for people who have lost limbs, are paralyzed, or are suffering from locked-in syndrome.
Related content:
Discoblog: Attention Poachers: That Deer Just Might Be a Robot
80beats: Bionic Monkeys!
Science Not Fiction: A Robot That Tries To Rock You Asleep
Science Not Fiction: Mind Controlled Wheelchairs, They’re for Reals
DISCOVER: The Bionic Rat
Image: University of Tokyo’s Medical Engineering and Life Science Laboratory
September 24 2010
Modded iPod Nano Bot Dances to Its Own Music
This little 6th generation iPod nano just wants to dance. Because that’s what its human programmed it to do. Kazu Terasaki, also known as YouTube user PachimonDotCom, is a Japanese software engineer from Silicon Valley, CA who is addicted to making apple products walk around.
He has been working on this project for years, hoping to create a robo-legs product that could give any gadget the ability to walk around, says a GetRobo post about Kazu’s walking objects project from 2008:
Kazu’s expertise and motto is “to surprise people by creating new stuff using just ordinary technology.” His ideas and perspective have brought in a breath of fresh air to the robotics community in Japan where engineers generally want to use the most advanced and expensive technologies.
To give this little bot legs, Kazu attached two servos (one for each leg) and a battery to the back of the iPod. To control the legs, he used the signal from the headphone jack as a pulse-width modification signal, which means it can tell the battery to provide intermediate amounts of power between a fully on and a fully off state.
Kazu even added googly eyes, and Mashable figured out his trick:
Getting the nano to display an animation was done with a simple trick, since the nano is not iOS-based and doesn’t allow the installation of third party apps. It does, however, display animated GIFs, and that’s how the eye animation was created.
Before robo-sizing the nano, Kazu had also given legs to a couple of iPhones and an iPad. Let’s just say he is is the wind beneath their servos, check out their dance troupe in the video below.
Related content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Enter the nano-spiders – independent walking robots made of DNA
80beats: Japanese Consortium: We’ll Send a Humanoid Robot to Walk on the Moon
80beats: Meet the First Robot That Can Walk on Sand (and Maybe Sandy Planets)
Discover Magazine: The Robot Invasion Is Coming—and That’s a Good Thing
Discover Magazine: The Rise of the Machines Is Not Going as We Expected
Videos: Youtube/PachimonDotCom
July 22 2010
Online Shoppers Can Play Dress-Up With a Robotic Torso
Add one more job to the list–along with vacuuming floors and assisting in surgeries, now robots can try on clothes for you. The company Fits.me is developing a robotic torso for online shoppers that can morph to match shoppers’ body dimensions, creating virtual fitting rooms on clothing websites.
Men can try a demo version of the product on the company’s site. After entering measurements such as neck and waste size, and selecting from three torso types, the site displays what you might look like in a particular shirt. The torso doesn’t morph in real time; instead, the site pulls from a database of pictures–2,000 body size combinations, the company reports, systematically showing users if pinstripes in small, medium, or large will make them look fat. Shirt sellers Hawes and Curtis is already testing a version of the system on their site.
As reported by the BBC, the company next hopes to develop a version of the torso for women. Maarja Kruusma a professor of biorobotics at the University of Tallinn who helped the company develop the system, told the BBC that it’s a difficult task. Women’s clothing comes in more intricate styles, and their torsos are more complicated to model, she says:
“You can’t just take a male mannequin and put breasts on it. That doesn’t work.”
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Discoblog: Robot Model Struts the Catwalk in Japan
Discoblog: Swine Flu Fashion? Japan Introduces Swine Flu-Proof Suit
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