Robot Surgeon Tested Underwater

Doctors and scientists from the University of Washington will get a glimpse of what it would be like to do remote surgery in space when a portable medical robot they created will be tested next month in an underwater environment designed by NASA to simulate zero gravity.

The portable robot, which can be controlled over the Internet by a human surgeon many miles away, is being developed with money from the U.S. Defense Department to be used to treat wounded soldiers on a battlefield, to perform complicated surgery on patients in remote areas of the developing world and to help sick astronauts in space.

The difference between the robot surgeon demonstrated at the University of Washington on Wednesday and others that are being used today in American hospitals involves portability and communications, said Professor Blake Hannaford, co-director of the UW BioRobotics Lab.

All the portable parts of this device weigh about 50 pounds and can be transported and reconstructed by non-engineers at remote sites. Robot surgeons currently being used in hospitals weigh several thousand pounds, are not portable and can't be easily broken down and reconstructed.

Current medical robots also were not designed to be controlled from miles away.

When the mobile surgical robot called Raven is in the Aquarius Undersea Laboratory off the coast of Florida, its robotic arms holding surgical instruments will be operated by doctors in Seattle sitting in front of a computer screen and holding onto moveable metal arms.

The experiment will involve sewing up a tear in a rubber tube that is being used as a simulated blood vessel. The surgeons will also do a skill test used to judge student doctors.

The surgeons' digital instructions will travel over a commercial Internet connection from Seattle to Key Largo, Fla., and then through a wireless connection to a buoy, which is connected by cable to the submarine-like research pod about 60 feet underwater. Two NASA astronauts and a NASA flight surgeon will be in the underwater pod with the robot.

Mitchell Lum, a research assistant and electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate, said an expected time delay of up to a second — between the surgeon's digital instructions and movement of the robot's arms — should be the most challenging part of the experiment.

"We think they will take longer to complete the tasks but we don't think it's undoable," Lum said.

In zero gravity, both the robot and the patient will have to be immobilized, and doctors will have to deal with the different ways organs and bodily fluids move without gravity, explained Dr. Mika Sinanan, a professor in the department of surgery at the UW Medical Center who has been working closely with the project and demonstrated the robot for reporters on Wednesday.

The researchers said a major goal of the underwater experiment is to show that the robot can be dismantled, transported and set up by non-engineers in the zero gravity environment.

The co-director of the BioRobotics Lab, Associate Professor Jacob Rosen, said they needed the cooperation of doctors and every kind of engineer and computer scientist to make the robot work.

"We've all had to learn how to go into the different realms," Rosen said.

Sinanan said learning to use the robot was similar to learning a complex new surgical instrument, and comparable to the training for doing minimally invasive laproscopic surgery.

In addition to its applications on the battlefield, Sinanan expected the robot would be developed for surgery that requires very precise work in small spaces, such as coronary bypass operations or prostate surgery.

He said he was confident that robots would become standard in the operating room, but "it's going to be a slow evolution."

NASA is paying for the underwater experiment, scheduled for May 7-18, but the rest of the project is being paid for by the Defense Department. Two graduate students are scheduled to travel to Florida with Raven this Friday.

The robot was tested last summer in California's Simi Valley, using an unmanned aircraft with a wireless transmitter for communications.

Another robot being developed by SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., will be tested in the underwater lab after the University of Washington project is tested. Neither robot has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use on humans, Hannaford said.

New 'Terminator' Robots Go in Harm's Way

IRobot, best known for their cute Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, has teamed up with Metal Storm, purveyors of the million-rounds-per-minute electric gun, to create a slick, Terminator-like war robot for the U.S. military.

The as yet unnamed war bot is being marketed for "border patrol" and "crowd control" scenarios, although other military situations are also under consideration.

"We want our soldiers to have the option of controlling a robot that could go ahead and investigate, engage or deter an enemy and not put human soldiers at risk," said a spokesman for Metal Storm who wished to remain anonymous.

This new war bot will likely soon join the existing ranks of military robots deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. military has used various war bots, from both iRobot and its competitor Foster-Miller, for years, primarily to diffuse bombs and other unexploded ordinances.

The first armed robots appeared in Iraq in 2007 as part of Foster-Miller's SWORDS program. They were armed with M249 light machine guns and received limited service in Iraq.

Since then robot armaments have increased. The Metal Storm/iRobot robot can be equipped with a variety of weapons, from non-lethal rubber bullets to grenade launchers. As many as 12 different Metal Storm weapons can be put onto the iRobot platform at the same time, said a Metal Storm spokesman.

The difference between Metal Storm weapons and other guns is the firing mechanism.

Traditional guns rely on a firing pin to physically strike the flat end of a round resting in the firing chamber, creating hot gases that propel the bullet down and out of the gun barrel.

A Metal Storm gun however, fires the bullets electrically, not physically. Pull the trigger and an electrical charge from a battery is sent down the barrel of the gun, triggering the chemical reaction that sends a bullet flying.

There are no moving parts (besides the bullet) and multiple bullets fit into a single gun barrel, letting the gunner fire much faster than traditional firearms. Metal Storm claims their weapons can fire (theoretically) up to a million rounds a minute.

While Foster-Miller might lack an exotic firing mechanism, their robots still pack plenty of fire power.

Their latest MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System) robots can carry anything from pepper spray and laser dazzlers to 40-mm grenade launcher or a M240B medium machine gun. Foster-Miller delivered their 2,000th war bot to the military earlier this month.

Perhaps even more important than weaponry is durability.

"[The robots] can take a beating," said Robert Quinn, an engineer at Foster-Miller. "Some of our robots have been blown up 10, even 15 times, and they still work."

If a warrior robot is damaged in battle, the military has a system in place to repair them. A network of seven robot hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan keeps wounded war bots healthy.

Robot warriors might be armed, sent into battle, and even wounded like humans, but they lack the most important aspect of a warrior (and for doomsday scenarios): intelligence.

All of the robots are controlled remotely by human soldiers to keep their comrades safe in threatening situations. There is no artificial intelligence on board.

"Our soldiers know when they are facing a threatening situation," said Quinn. "In those circumstances they would like to send a robot instead of a human so the humans can remain safe."

"This is trying to give a team of soldiers a 'tenth man' that is expendable to enemy fire," said Quinn.

Robots to Become Lovers, Predict Researchers

Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer the stuff of science fiction -- researchers expect them to become reality within four decades.

And they do not mean simply, mechanical sex.

"I am talking about loving relationships about 40 years from now," David Levy, author of the book "Love + sex with robots", told AFP at an international conference held last week at the University of Maastricht in the south-east of the country.

"... when there are robots that have also emotions, personality, consciousness. They can talk to you, they can make you laugh. They can ... say they love you just like a human would say 'I love you', and say it as though they mean it ..."

Robots as sex toys should already be on the market within five years, predicted Levy, "a sort of an upgrade of the sex dolls on sale now".

These would have electronic speech and sensors that make them utter "nice sounds" when a human caresses their "erogenous zones".

But to build robots as real partners would take a bit longer, with conversation skills being the main obstacle for developers.

Scientists were working on artificial personality, emotion and consciousness, said Levy, and some robots already appear lifelike.

"But for loving relationships -- that is something completely different. In loving relationships there are many more things that are important. And the most difficult of all is conversation.

"You want your robot to be able to talk to you about what is interesting to you. You want a partner who has some similar interest to you, who talks to you in a manner that pleases you, who has a similar sense of humour to you."

The field of human-computer conversation is crucial to building robots with whom humans could fall in love, but is lagging behind other areas of development, said the author.

"I am sure it will (happen.) In 40 years ... perhaps sooner. You will find robots, conversation partners, that will talk to you and you will get as much pleasure from it as talking to another human. I am sure of it."

Levy's bombshell thesis, whose publication has had a ripple-effect way beyond the scientific community, gives rise to a number of complicated ethical and relationship questions.

British scholar Dylan Evans pointed out the paradox inherent to any relationship with a robot.

"What is absolutely crucial to the sentiment of love, is the belief that the love is neither unconditional nor eternal.

"Robots cannot choose you, they cannot reject you. That could become very boring, and one can imagine the human becoming cruel against his defenseless partner", said Evans.

A robot could conceivably be programmed with a will of its own and the ability to reject his human partner, he said, "but that would be a very difficult robot to sell".

Some warn against being overhasty.

"Let us not exaggerate the possibilities!" said Dutch researcher Vincent Wiegel of the Technological University of the eastern town of Delft.

"Today, the artificial intelligence we are able to create is that of a child of one year of age."

But Levy is unyielding. He is convinced it will happen, and predicts many societal benefits.

"There are many millions of people in the world who have nobody. They might be shy or they might have some psychological hang-ups or psycho-sexual hang-ups, they might have personality problems, they might be ugly ...

"There will always be many millions of people who cannot make normal satisfactory relationships with humans, and for them the choice is not: 'would I prefer a relationship with a human or would I prefer a relationship with a robot?' -- the choice is no relationship at all or a relationship with a robot."

They might even become human-to-human relationship savers, he predicted.

"Certainly there will be some existing human-human relationships where one partner might say to the other partner: 'if you have sex with a robot I'm leaving you'.

"There will be others who say: 'when you go on your business trip please take your robot because I happen to worry about the red light district'."