Robots may become heroes in war on coronavirus

SAN FRANCISCO — Long maligned as job-stealers and aspiring overlords, robots are being increasingly relied on as fast, efficient, contagion-proof champions in the war against the deadly coronavirus.

One team of robots temporarily cared for patients in a makeshift hospital in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the COVID-19 outbreak began.

Meals were served, temperatures taken and communications handled by machines, one of them named "Cloud Ginger" by its maker CloudMinds, which has operations in Beijing and California.


"It provided useful information, conversational engagement, entertainment with dancing, and even led patients through stretching exercises," CloudMinds president Karl Zhao said of the humanoid robot.

"The smart field hospital was completely run by robots."

A small medical team remotely controlled the field hospital robots. Patients wore wristbands that gathered blood pressure and other vital data.

The smart clinic only handled patients for a few days, but it foreshadowed a future in which robots tend to patients with contagious diseases while health care workers manage from safe distances.

Checkup and check out

Patients in hospitals in Thailand, Israel and elsewhere meet with robots for consultations done by doctors via videoconference. Some consultation robots even tend to the classic checkup task of listening to patients' lungs as they breathe.

Alexandra Hospital in Singapore will use a robot called BeamPro to deliver medicine and meals to patients diagnosed with COVID-19 or those suspected to be infected with the virus in its isolation wards.

Doctors and nurses can control the robot by using a computer from outside the room, and can hold conversations with the patient via the screen and camera.

The robot reduces the number of  "touch points" with patients who are isolated, thereby reducing risk for healthcare workers, the hospital's health innovation director Alexander Yip told local news channel CNA.

Robotic machines can also be sent to scan for the presence of the virus, such as when the Diamond Princess cruise ship cabins were checked for safety weeks after infected passengers were evacuated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control.

Additionally, hospitals are turning to robots to tirelessly rid room, halls and door handles of viruses and bacteria.

US firm Xenex has seen a surge in demand for its robots that disinfect rooms, according to director of media relations Melinda Hart.

Xenex's LightStrike robots have been used in more than 500 healthcare facilities, with the number of deployed bots rising due to the pandemic, Hart said.

"We are getting requests from around the world," Hart said.

"In addition to hospitals, we're being contacted by urgent care centers, hotels, government agencies and pharmaceutical companies" to disinfect rooms.

Shark Robotics in France began testing a decontamination unit about a month ago and has already started getting orders, according to co-founder Cyril Kabbara.

Worth the price?

The coronavirus pandemic has caused robotics innovation to accelerate, according to Lesley Rohrbaugh, the director of research for the US Consumer Technology Association.

"We are in a time of need for some of this technology, so it seems like benefits outweigh costs," Rohrbaugh said.

Artificial intelligence, sensors and other capabilities built into robots can push up prices, as can the need to bolster high-speed internet connections on which machines often rely, according to Rohrbaugh.

Innovations on the horizon include using drones equipped with sensors and cameras to scan crowds for signs of people showing symptoms of coronavirus infection.

A team at the University of South Australia is working on just that, in collaboration with Canadian drone maker Draganfly.

"The use will be to identify the possible presence of the virus by observing humans," said university professor Javaan Singh Chahl.

"It might form part of an early warning system or to establish statistically how many people are afflicted in a population."

His team is working on computer algorithms that can spot sneezing or coughing, say in an airport terminal, and remotely measure people's pulses and temperatures.

Agence France-Presse

Japan robot firm showcases thought-controlled suits

KAWASAKI — A Japanese robot-maker on Wednesday showed off suits that the wearer can control just by thinking, as it said it was linking up with an industrial city promoting innovation.

Cyberdyne founder Yoshiyuki Sankai said he was allying with Kawasaki, a city south of Tokyo, to explore ways to expand real-life applications for his robo-suits, which are often used for physical therapy.

“We want to make technology that actually helps people,” Sankai, who is also a professor of engineering at the University of Tsukuba, northeast of Tokyo, said.

Cyberdyne, based in Tsukuba, makes power-assisted robotic suits, limbs and joints that can help the elderly and disabled to get around or can help industrial workers to lift heavy objects.

The machines detect weak electrical pulses that run through the skin when the wearer’s brain sends the message to the limb to move.

The robot then moves exactly in concert with the natural limb, but provides much more power than it could exert on its own.

“We don’t want people to see individuals wearing our products and think ‘Gee, it must be so hard (to live with ailments)’,” Sankai said.

“Rather, we want people to see the robot and say, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic’,” he said.

source: interaksyon.com

Smithsonian rolls out 'Bionic Man'

WASHINGTON -- A first-ever walking, talking "bionic man" built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.

The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum was built by London's Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.

"This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development," museum director John Dailey said.

The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, "The Incredible Bionic Man," airing on Sunday.

A "bionic man" was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show "The Six Million Dollar Man" showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.

The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.

"The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today -- one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?" said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.

The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.

"It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy," said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.

The robot has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.

The bionic creation's artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.

"The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," he said. "So, he's not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with."

Assembly began in August 2012 and took three months to finish.

The robot made its US debut last week at New York's Comic Con convention. It will be on display at the museum throughout the fall.

source: interaksyon.com

Meet squid-bot, a robot that camouflages itself

PARIS — Scientists in the United States have devised a rubbery robot, inspired by the squid and octopus, which can crawl, camouflage itself and hide from infrared cameras.

The Pentagon-backed gadget is the latest type of a so-called soft machine, meaning silicone-based robots that are made from squidgy, translucent polymers.

The prototype incorporates a thin sheet of special silicone with microscopic channels through which colored fluids are pumped so that the robot’s “skin” mimics the colors and patterns of the surrounding environment.

By pumping heated or cooled liquids into the microchannels, the researchers can also mask the robot thermally so that its infrared signature does not stand out against a cold or hot background.

The prototype is a four-legged entity, 13 centimeters long.

Its limbs are splayed out in the form of an X and, using compressed air, flex like a child’s toy, enabling the little machine to crawl forward with a lurching left-right movement.

“When we began working on soft robots, we were inspired by soft organisms, including octopi and squid,” Stephen Morin, a specialist in chemical biology at Harvard University, said in a press release.

“One of the fascinating characteristics of these animals is their ability to control their appearance, and that inspired us to take this idea further and explore dynamic coloration.”

Morin added: “Even when using simple systems—in this case we have simple, open-ended micro-channels—you can achieve a great deal in terms of your ability to camouflage an object, or to display where an object is.”

The research is published in the U.S. journal Science.

Its financial backers were the U.S. Department of Energy and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which supports research into innovative technology with military potential.

source: japantoday.com