Science
(2007-01-26)
BALTIMORE
(wypr) -
ROBOTSSIMMONS
AIR: 1/26/07
TRT:
INTRO:
In this month's issue of the magazine Scientific American, Bill Gates writes about a world where everyone will have not just a computer, but a robot. It's part of the latest revolution the Microsoft czar predicts is ready to sweep into our daily lives. It will, he wrote, make as strong an impact as the personal computer did. WYPR's Melody Simmons paid a recent visit to a Johns Hopkins University robot research lab and filed this report.
BODY:
AMBIANCE: Sound of the lab, Track 212 @ :40
A little tap here. A whir there. This is the sound of a surgical robot called the DaVinci. It's being used worldwide to perform a hip replacement or remove a gallbladder. A surgeon sits nearby, moving what looks like a joy stick that activates the mechanical arm.
TAPE: (10 SECONDS, :11, Track 212)
There's dexterity in the end of the robotic tools and improved visualization and improved motion scaling when the surgeon sits at the console instead of trying to hold the tools by hand.
That's Allison Okamura. She is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. In her lab, a bright room on the Homewood campus, there's a DaVinci robot that sits on a tabletop, looking like a glorified tinker toy.
Okamura and others here have been working on how to send surgeons a sense of haptic feedback, or touch, from the DaVinci's robotic arm. It's part of a surge in robotics research going on in computer engineering today.
The addition of haptics [ ] still a half dozen years away [ ] takes it to a new level. Already big in video games like a NASCAR-like rumble pack, Okamura says it will eventually revolutionize the O-R.
TAPE: (25 SECONDS, :58, Track 219)
IC: One of the things that really excites me about this research is that we are going to improve health care and it's not just through the specific project of adding haptic feedback to a robot, but providing surgeons and any kind of doctor with more information and giving them super human abilities and this is going to extend far beyond applications of just this robot to any situation where we're trying to improve healthcare.
Marie DesJardins is a computer science professor at UMBC. She said that while robots have been around for about 30 years, they are just now beginning, to borrow a human phrase, to multi-task.
TAPE: (06 SECONDS, 5:43)
IC: What's going to happen next is we're going to have more and more intelligent robots that actually do start making decisions.
DesJardins says some robots are already making medical decisions, such as life support machines and respirators. They are controlled by computers, yet have a human in the loop.
MicroSoft founder Bill Gates writes in this month's Scientific American, that the cost of developing robotic sensors has dropped, along with the cost of megahertz processing power. This essentially mainstreams robots. By 2025, Gates said the personal robot industry will be worth more than 50-billion dollars-a-year.
That's a lot of money, but there are other considerations.
Where do morals come in? Ron Arkin teaches a course in robot ethics at Georgia Tech and belongs to an international committee exploring robot principles.
TAPE: (20 SECONDS, 1:07)
We are looking at a wide range of issues the research community has widely ignored. These include things like the application of lethal force and force in general in terms of human/robot interaction. It deals with the notion of human/robot intimacy. And the ways in which humans and robots can relate effectively with each other.
This spring in Rome, Arkin said scientists will gather to explore exoskeletons or robotic devices that amplify human force, something movie writers have fantasized about in movies like The Terminator. But, perhaps, a less-entertaining and more productive result could be a robot surgeon, like the one researchers here are already working on.
I'm Melody Simmons, reporting in Homewood, for 88.1, WYPR
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