Carol Reiley, a surgical robotics PhD student at Johns Hopkins' Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory, wrote in to share how they unwind after a long day of research.  She writes, "Here's a video of the Johns Hopkins Robotics lab playing the board game Operation on the $1.3M dollar (Da Vinci Surgical) robot. The video emphasizes the robot's precision and hand tremor reduction as well as how difficult Operation is to play, even with a robot. :-)" Fun, whimsical, and a bit meta.  Surgical roboticists seem to enjoy themselves; seems like just yesterday they were using the robot to make little paper airplanes or produce dance videos.

I would like to point out two news items involving telepresence robots that are definitely worth reading.  First, a "manifesto" reprinted from the June 1980 issue of Omni magazine where artificial intelligence pioneer, Marvin Minsky, shares his views on telepresence (a term he originally coined).  His essay includes a prediction of remote avatars (ie. Surrogates), operation in hazardous / remote environments, and even a discussion of how little development has occurred since the 1950's (remember, his essay is from 1980; did you know that full-body exoskeletons were produced back in the 1950s?!).  Second, a NYTimes article by John Markoff that discusses five top American contenders in the space: Vgo (Vgo Communications), Tilr (RoboDynamics), Texai (Willow Garage), RP-7i (InTouch Health), and QB (Anybots).  The article captures the society aspect and high-level overview but lacks meaty technology details (though the side-by-side photo montage is useful for direct comparison).

Two weeks ago, Engadget / CrunchGear posted videos of RAPUDA (Robotic Arm for Persons with Upper limb DisAbilities) from AIST's Intelligent Systems Research Institute -- a wheelchair-mounted, light-weight robot arm with a prominent telescoping link that was demonstrated grasping a cup from a table, lifting the cup for drinking, and grasping an object from the floor via teleoperation (video embedded below).  Given my proclivity for clever mechanisms, I wanted details about the telescoping link, specifically to determine how it compares to the Geosystems Situational Awareness Mast (aka Zippermast).  Well, I found what I was looking for: a Japanese patent application for "Linearly Moving Extendable Mechanism and Robot Arm Equipped with Linearly Moving Extendable Mechanism."  Basically, the telescoping segment consists of a series of small interlocking modules that are expelled (or reeled-in) through the "shoulder" link.  Check out the pictures -- cool stuff!

Electrotactile arrays are a lesser-known form of human-machine interface (HMI) that apply electric current to skin-contacting surface electrodes to excite cutaneous nerves and give the illusion of texture, pressure, or pinpricks (depending on current strength and electrode resolution) all without mechanical vibration.  This technique has been around for many years for:  non-visual fighter pilot status displays, tongue interfaces, surgery guides, and for forehead-mounted camera displays for the blind.  Enough background... The exciting news is a recent product developed by Senseg and Toshiba Information Systems called "E-Sense" that successfully embeds an electrotactile display into a touchpad, LCD, or other curved surface (eg. all over a cellphone), thereby providing programmable high-resolution texture feedback to a user -- see the video embedded below.  I would wager that this feedback could greatly enhance haptic shared awareness in teleoperation / telemanipulation systems.

The Boston Globe has unearthed another solid player in the remote presence (sometimes referred to as mobile telepresence or mobile videoconferencing) game. This time, it is the Vgo (pronounced Vee-Go) robot from Vgo Communications. Apparently Vgo Communications was founded in 2007 by Tim Root and has upwards of $8M in venture capital funding. The Vgo robot is pretty sleek with a nice cosmetic shell, though it seems a bit vertically challenged. Its target price-point is somewhere around $5000, with a required $1200 annual support contract. This comes just days after Anybots made their QB robot announcements ($15,000 ea.) and after some high-profile Willow Garage Texai events. A few other major players have been relatively quiet as of late, such as InTouch Health and Giraff Technologies (formerly HeadThere).

Colleague and labmate, Tiffany Chen, pointed out an interesting new robot named "MeBot" from MIT's Personal Robotics Group.  Later this week, MeBot will be presented at the conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2010) in Osaka, Japan.  The associated paper, "MeBot: A Robotic Platform for Socially Embodied Presence," has been nominated for best paper.  In a nutshell, MeBot is a semi-autonomous robotic avatar that provides rich, remote interaction by conveying non-verbal channels of social communication in addition to video, something that is not provided by existing phone and video conferencing.  The expressiveness of MeBot is impressive.  It reminds me of the (now well-known) CrabFu Swashbot, but ups the ante by including video capabilities.  Be sure to check out the videos and photos below to see what I mean.

We've seen robots controlled with projector interfaces and laser-pointer interfaces, and now we can add tabletop interfaces to the list.  My labmate, Hai Nguyen, pointed out the CRISTAL project from the Media Interaction Lab at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences.  The CRYSTAL project is an interesting "smart home" technology that uses a tabletop interface (similar to Microsoft's Surface) and a ceiling-mounted camera to display and control household electronics such as lights, TVs, digital picture frames, and robots!  To command the robot, the user "draws" the desired robot path on the tabletop computer using their finger.  The robot then follows the route via optical tracking through the ceiling-mounted camera. Interesting interaction, and its always good to see robots become sufficiently ubiquitous that they're classified (and controlled) in the same manner as other home electronics.  Check out a video of the interaction below.

At ICRA 2009, the Rollin' Justin humanoid robot (the lovable robot that "Danced Like in Pulp Fiction") demonstrated some impressive teleoperation capabilities.  The man-machine interface (MMI) consists of two components.  The first component comprises two DLR-III lightweight arms, the same type employed by the robot, terminated with force-torque sensing load cells to command the omnidirectional base or the arms / hands.  Meanwhile, the second component, a fully-immersive heads-up display with vicon (optical) head tracking, constantly streams robot-mounted camera images to the heads-up display while simultaneously panning and tilting the robot's head in concert with the user's head movements.  All-in-all, this is a very impressively engineered system.  Be sure to check out the pictures and video below.

I think this is both brilliant and hilarious... University of Delaware researchers, James Galloway and Sunil Agrawal, were awarded a two-year, $325k NSF grant to explore robot-enabled mobility for special needs children, with the goal of spurring cognitive development -- this is brilliant.  However, why focus solely on special needs children?  I think it is hilarious to imagine "regular" children using "smart wheelchairs" to putter around before they learn to crawl / walk -- it would certainly make for some entertaining rounds of baby-bumper-cars!  Adding to the hilarity, their initial prototypes are Pioneer robots pulling a plywood trailer, supported by casters, with a small chair atop (images below)!  But who am I to judge... we can all relate to "ugly prototype syndrome."

Early robots have found utility in warfare dating back to World War II (and arguably earlier), with the invention of simple electrical servo-mechanisms for fire control and targeting.  While fire control has become extremely advanced, its "human in the loop"  nature kept us (relatively) oblivious of the ethical implications of robots in warfare.  However, increased autonomy and point-and-click capabilities are forcing us to reevaluate the ethical implications of robots in warfare.  Enter a new book by P.W. Singer, entitled Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.  Singer was recently interviewed by NPR (and on The Daily Show by Jon Stewart), where he talked about a number of interesting issues.  Links and discussion follow.

The Situational Awareness Mast (SAM, also known as a Zipper Mast) from Geosystems Inc. is a telescoping linear actuator that has a unique property -- it's stroke length is an order of magnitude greater than its nominal height!  For example, the SAM8 is a 10 lb device with a stroke length (8ft) that is 24 times it's nominal height (4 inches)!  This can be used to vertically translate a robot's sensor suite for better visibility while still allowing for a low profile.  Read on for information on the different Zipper Mast variants, the patent describing the system, and an exclusive video of a Zipper Mast on an iRobot Packbot!