Open up your mind and say, ahh...

We know that the aging baby boomer population will have a big impact on health care staff. One of the best solutions is to allow doctors to telecommute to hospitals around the globe. And, as sci-fi as it may sound today, what better way to telecommute than in a robotic avatar?

The RP-VITA is a collaboration between iRobot–makers of everything from friendly Roombas to deadly combat robots–and InTouch Health, telemedicine specialists. It’s ostensibly a monitor on wheels that rolls around hospitals not so differently from the Jetson’s Rosie, allowing a doctor to have a physical presence to see patients face-to-face.

But even in the world of high-tech robots and cross-country diagnostic medicine, iRobot’s core involvement with the project was as simple as it could get: to make robots work for everyday humans rather than engineers. And ultimately, some of the same technologies that power Roombas.

“Perhaps the greatest thing about Roomba is that it’s easy to use and works. The same can be said for RP-VITA,” writes iRobot SVP Glen Weinstein. “While it is used in a very different setting to achieve a very different objective, some of the chief design goals around the robot were the same–to make it easy to use, effective in navigating its environment and doing its job well.”

Specifically, while InTouch has been making telemedicine robots for a while now, they had a big limitation: They were operated by a joystick, meaning a doctor needed to steer a complicated piece of machinery through a hospital, using a PC console. When they reached the room–again, navigating the robot around IV drips and diagnostic machines near a bedside–the robot pilot had to shift gears and focus on being a doctor.

iRobot recently invested a few million dollars in InTouch, and along with that investment came some technology that iRobot was very good at: pathfinding. So the RP-VITA is loaded with Roomba-like collision detection and area mapping–simplifying complicated joystick maneuvers to very basic steering–and doctors can now use iPads rather than clunkier PCs to drive the robot and connect to patients via integrated webcam.

“The enhanced navigation is important because it allows RP-VITA to take on more of the driving and navigation tasks so the clinician is free to focus on patient care,” writes Weinstein, who adds that this is far from the end UI for the RP-VITA. This fall, pending FDA approval, iRobot’s pathfinding technology will allow doctors to move from room to room by simply tapping their destination on the iPad’s screen. That’s the sort of end-game UI that could actually make robotic doctors practical–even if there are a lot of design problems left for us, as patients, to feel as comfortable with virtual doctor robots as we do flesh-and-bone humans.

Hat tip: Mashable

Image: oknoart/Shutterstock

In a nondescript central Los Angeles neighborhood sits a renovated warehouse, home to the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or Sci-Arc for short. The small graduate school, which is noted for producing architects who go on to work in highly specialized fields like digital animation, is run by a core group of LA architects who place special emphasis on advanced fabrication. The school’s new Robot House, for example, is a dedicated laboratory for students interested in, well, learning how to program robots.

Robotic arms, to be more specific. The Robot House (it’s more like a room) has five of them, Staübli-brand machines with “hands” that can be programmed to do just about anything. Initiated in spring of last year, the lab has already produced some pretty cool stuff. The latest is a complex acrylic sculpture called Hot Networks, authored by Brandon Kruysman and Jonathan Proto, the two young designers Sci-Arc appointed to run and teach the Robot House lab.

In Hot Networks, Kruysman and Proto have given each robotic arm a different task: one positions the work surface, a another picks up and places a plastic cylinder, a third heats up the plastic as it’s set into place, melting and deforming against the others. Another arm airbrushes the cooled pieces, and the fifth arm films the whole thing for posterity. It’s a bit like earlier robotic building experiments (like this one, in which an arm builds a brick wall), but about five times more complex.

The highly choreographed network is made possible by a programming language the duo wrote specifically for the Robot House. Esperant.O, as it’s cleverly called, translates MAYA’s dynamic systems (like skeletons and moving parts) into a language that the mechanical arms can understand. “Esperant.O opens up an entirely new way to engage making through industrial robotics,” write the duo on their website. MAYA, an animation and rendering software that’s typically used to make stuff move on-screen, is being used to control real-time moving parts. For anyone unfamiliar with the software, a vastly over-simplified analogy would be a cartoonist who’s invented a way to control real-life people using his pencil and paper.

It’s funny that we never really get a good look at the morphing plastic sculpture. But the ambivalence the designers seem to feel about showing off the piece plays to the concept behind Robot House. The final product might look cool, sure, but it’s just a byproduct of the real work – the programming itself.

Bot vid: Darpa’s Robbie

One of the more interesting robotics programs that DARPA funds is the Autonomous Robotic Manipulation project, designed to produce robots that can perform relatively complex tasks without too much supervision (obvious military implications here). As revealed over at the Automaton blog, robot maker RE2 has a robot in this program, cheerfully dubbed Robbie. The strength of the robot’s design is in its grippers that approximate human hands. They have sensors so the machine even feels “touch” a little like we do.

Bot vid: Smart Tripod

The winner of this year’s Microsoft Robotics @Home competition is interesting: It’s a tripod on a mobile base that can follow its subjects around, using a Kinect sensor to navigate and detect the movements of its human subjects for control purposes. The tech can be used for, say, creating a low-budget movie’s tracking shots. The winner was Arthur Wait, who earned a check for $10,000.

Bot vid: Fukushimabot

The Future Robotics Technology Center in Japan has just demonstrated its new robot destined to help assess and perhaps clean up the nuclear mess at Japan’s tsunami-ravaged Fukushima nuclear site. Rosemary, as the machine is called, is roughly the size of a lawnmower and has unusual feet that swivel to navigate obstacles or crawl up a slope of greater than 60 degrees. Best of all it’s strong enough to carry gear weighing up to 60 kilos (approx. 132 lbs.), making it ideal for ferrying sensors, imaging units, and perhaps clean-up equipment into radiation-damaged zones.

Bot News

Robofish. This week a large yellow robot fish could be seen swimming in the ocean off the Spanish port of Gijon, taking part in free water tests of its systems. The five-foot, $31,000 European machine is crammed with sensors designed to detect pollutants that have leaked from vessels or underwater facilities like pipelines, and the goal is to have many fish swimming in sensitive areas to give a very early warning of contamination. Its fish-like design is an attempt to avoid problems like propeller snarl on debris.

Ocean swimmers. On Monday the famous WaveGlider robots from Liquid Robotics were sent off from their stopover at Hawaii en route to their final destinations in Japan and Australia. The experiment is already a success, and the devices have proven useful in collecting data on sea and air environments to aid climate studies and weather forecasting. They swim autonomously, propelled by the motion of water waves.

Australian telepresence museum bot. By November this year the Australian National Museum, in concert with science body CSIRO, will have a robotic telepresence droid roaming its corridors. Equipped with sensors and clever camera units, the idea is to give remote students access to each of the museum’s exhibits in more detail than may be possible with a visit in person. It’s a six-month experiment that may become permanent.

Bot Futures: The First President of the Robot Era?

When the next President of the United States takes office in 2013, it’s unlikely he’ll have to get to work on a raft of robotics legislation. But as an intriguing NPR piece points out this week, he is likely to be the very first president who has to deal with robotics-related issues on a regular basis.

That’s simply because robots are everywhere, and their presence in places of work, military forces, police forces, emergency services, farms, factories, and homes is only increasing. Robotic technology is penetrating deeply into American lifestyles.

Robots are, for example, finding uses on farms where they can simplify many of the more mundane farming jobs like tilling, distributing pesticide, and even crop-harvesting–potentially driving up efficiency and thus lowering production costs. Robot technology is being used in schools to drive student interest in science and engineering…and even to teach some lessons or boost student writing skills. They’re going to take over the role of some military pilots soon enough, and the ever-expanding drone fleet means U.S. robots are killing enemy combatants, and, sadly, making mistakes overseas right now. Drone robots are even penetrating the skies of the U.S. And there are early examples of the use of robots as political agitators, as in the case of the ONE Street Tweeter, which prints political protest tweets on the streets like a giant mobile inkjet printer.

A few of the thorny issues facing the next president: Of course robots in the workforce improve efficiency and help drive costs down, but is it better for the population to have more folk employed and working slightly less efficiently? Will American citizens tolerate police forces using drones for surveillance, as they become ever more aware of their right to privacy? What happens when the first armed police drone kills a bystander?

By 2017, when the next Comander in Chief takes office, he or she may actually have to develop policies on robots in addition to economic, social, health care, and military matters. Such mechanical issues may even be part of the campaign.

Image: U.S. Navy