MC Weekly Issue #5, Tuesday, January 10, 2006
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”
Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.
I, Robot.
Suddenly robots are everywhere. Robotics is widely regarded as one of the four areas of technological development that is dramatically transforming how we live and what it means to be human. The other areas are Genetics, Information Technology and Nanotechnology, taken together as GRIN.
Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, robots were for me the stuff of Isaac Asimov novels, the Six Million Dollar Man, Lost in Space, and Robby the Robot who originally appeared in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. In other words, robots, for most of us, were clearly in the realm of speculation. Even in the 1980s, with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Blade Runner and RoboCop, it was hard to imagine the now ubiquitous, and exponentially growing, presence of robots and robotics. From the trivial, say Sony’s Aibo mechanical pet, to industrial, military, environmental, and space travel applications, robots are changing everything.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable areas of development, however, is the field of bionics. Bionics refers generally to the exchange between life sciences and design and engineering. It’s a two-way street that involves the design of nature itself, but also mimicking patterns and systems found in nature to better inform design. The case of Jesse Sullivan, featured in the current issue of Business Week, is exemplary. Jesse Sullivan is uses a fully robotic limb through a nerve-muscle graft. His bionic arm, a prototype developed by Todd A. Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, differs from most other prostheses in that it does not use pull cables or nub switches to function. Instead it uses micro-computers to perform a much broader range of complex motions. It also allows him to fully sense pressure. Sullivan had to have his arms amputated at the shoulder after an industrial accident. Seven weeks after the amputation, he received matching bionic prostheses from Dr. Todd A. Kuiken. Originally the prostheses were operated from neural signals at the amputation sites, but Sullivan developed hyper-sensitivity from his skin grafts, causing great discomfort, so he had neural surgery to graft nerves, which originally lead to his arm, to his chest. The sensors for his bionic arms have been moved to the left side of his chest to receive signals from the newly grafted nerve endings. According to Business Week, Kuiken “imagines that one day people might become bionic beings like TV’s Colonel Steve Austin. But he says that’s probably decades away.”
Other robo-sensations:
Over 1,000,000 robotic vacuum cleaners had been sold by the end of 2004. This holiday season iRobot launched the Scooba, an automated robotic floor washer. http://www.irobotstore.com
In Qatar and the UAE, remote-controlled robot jockeys have replaced the use of children in camel races. Which sounds like a good thing. http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=11612
The whole area of medical robotics is exploding. Intuitive Surgical ( http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/ ) recently received regulatory approval for their robots that perform minimally invasive surgery. Their extraordinary Da Vinci system can be viewed here.
Lab automation is also growing, where benchtop robots are used to move biological and chemical samples between incubators, liquid handlers and readers.
Robotic competition: Dean Kamen, familiar to readers of this newsletter and visitors to and readers of Massive Change, is the founder of FIRST: or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology ( http://www.usfirst.org/ ). FIRST was developed to excite students about science, engineering and technology. It is specifically designed to inspire high school students to become engineers by giving them real world experience with professional engineers to develop a robot. The first FIRST competition was held in 1992. FIRST spun off the FIRST LEGO League, aimed at younger students, and last year the FIRST Vex Challenge, for high school students who don’t have the resources for the FIRST Robotics Competition.
The FIRST Robotics Competition involves teams of mentors (corporate employees, teachers, or college students) and high school students who collaborate to design and build a robot in six weeks. This robot is designed to play a game, which is designed by FIRST and changes from year to year. This game is announced at a nationally simulcast kickoff event in January. Regional competitions take place around the United States as well as in Canada, and Israel, but FIRST has a multinational following that further includes the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, and Germany.
As of 2005, FIRST includes more than 1000 teams (around 20,000 students) competing in 31 Regional Competitions, as well as one championship competition held in Atlanta, Georgia.
