Noelle Gives Birth, But Not Without a Fight

The latest service bot in town comes from Ohio's Wright State University and was designed for health care professionals to practice emergencies in the delivery room. Noelle complains, groans and grunts and seizes her way through childbirth, with a detachable belly cover that every woman wishes she had. The $40,000 simulator keeps track of medical statistics and lets the participants perform several different predicaments, including some with her robotic baby. Good times.

Via Dayton Daily News

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Electric Robofish Filled With Silicone Oil

Robofish keep getting more sophisticated as evidenced by this electric swimmer. Controlled via electrostatic actuators as muscles, the fish has been filled with silicone oil and even moves its eyes around to appear more lifelike. The creation from Germany's University Venture Creation Science and Technology Agency runs left or right by an operational joystick, the result being that its tail propels it forward.

Via Sendensha (translated)

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ECH Taken Over by Robots, Almost

El Camino Hospital in Silicon Valley, CA have leased 19 robots to replace current workers. They handle chores such as delivering medication and food and take out the trash. The guy who took this video is certainly enchanted. The rentals amount to about $350,000 a year, according to Ken King, VP of facilities, while humans would have cost about a million a year. We are assuming that is more than 19 total employees as that would be a huge salary.

Via El Camino Hospital

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Robots With a Sense of Smell

We just cannot fathom how/why researchers come up with some of this stuff. The University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science took frog eggs, inserted insect RNA and ended up with robots with a sense of smell. This compact smelling sensor could be used in the future to detect the differences between chemicals, polluting gasses and hopefully a better class of burgers.

Via PNAS

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MIT Developing Oil Sucking Robots

MIT's Senseable City Lab will be debuting a prototype of their SeaSwarm technology this week at the Venice Biennale festival. The 16 ft. long belt made of nanowire mesh can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil. It skims the surface and absorbs the oil in its head, heats it and separates it from the mesh, then goes on to repeat the chore. Thousands of them can be used to swarm in the future. It is too bad that the tech was not available before now.

Via NY Times

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ATHLETE Celebrates Dance Day

NASA has been testing ATHLETE, an all-terrain robot for use on the Moon and Mars, but recently took a day off in honor of National Dance Day to bust a move. This certainly proves that even hexapods can have rhythm.

Via NASA

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ROLY Aids Wheelchair Bound Children

Training younger children to use a wheelchair can be difficult and requires a therapist to take them step by step. Dr. Laura Marchal-Crespo and team at the University of California at Irvine have developed ROLY (RObot-assisted Learning for Young drivers) so that no assistance is required and the kids can learn at their own pace. The chair uses haptic guidance to follow a line on the floor using computer vision while the child determines how much control of the joystick is needed.

Via Medical News Today

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Popchilla Assists Autistic Kids

The Autism Center of Pittsburgh and Interbots may have made it one step easier to communicate with children who suffer from Autism. Popchilla and an interactive iPad app create Character Therapy, a program that a therapist uses to create emotions in the robot that in turn may help the child better understand their own. This video demos one of Popchilla's current apps, "Let's Do Shapes."

Via Pad Gadget

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Beaumont Hospitals Adopt da Vinci Robots

The three Beaumont Hospitals in Metro Detroit have acquired da Vinci SI Surgical Systems to assist them. Last week, the Troy hospital tried theirs out for the first time to perform a success laparoscopic prostatectomy. Surgeons Kenneth Kernen and Jason Hafron used master controls while viewing the image in 3D. Dr. Kernen claims that the robodoctor "has transformed surgery for prostate cancer because of the technical and clinical advantages in terms of visual magnification and refinement in an area that can be difficult to operate on using traditional techniques."

(Thanks, Mike)

Via Beaumont Hospitals

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Wall-Climbing ROCR

William Provancher of the University of Utah and his team of mechanical engineers have collaborated with ROCR ('Rocker') the robot as the result. This little guy can climb a carpet-padded wall with the assistance of two hooks. Provancher sees the future of his climber to inspect buildings, bridges or nuclear facilities when equipped with a remote camera. Until that time, ROCR will be hanging out in the lab.

Via KSL

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DEPTHX Finds New Bacteria

Thanks to NASA's ASTEP funding, an underwater robot is studying biology in a series of sinkholes in Zacatón in northeastern Mexico. So far the autonomous DEPTHX, guided by a team of several universities, has gathered 100 types of microbes, including three new phyla of bacteria. It will continue to seek the unknown in months to come.

Via MSNBC

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Bionic Prothetic Arm is Controlled by Thinking

A new prosthetic arm is controlled by thoughts. Meant for quadriplegics, the limb is controlled via sensors that will be implanted in their brains. Sensors in the fingers send signals back to the brain. Still in the experimental stage, John Hopkins' APL has been awarded a $34.5 million contract with DARPA to develop the neural prosthesis over the next two years.

Via APL

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NASA R2 Gets Twitter Account

NASA's Robonaut 2 now has his own Twitter account. R2 will soon be heading to the final frontier to see how robots function in space both inside and outside the ISS. By the way, to assure his readers, the humanoid robot tweeted that he is not related to either Hal or Boba Fett.

Via R2 Twitter

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Sparse Array Improves Robot Communication

Adaptive Communications Research and Santa Clara University have teamed on creating 'sparse antenna' technology, making it easier for groups of robots to communicate with each other and home base. They are arranged in circular patterns or grids, then signal-processing software turns their antennas into a transmitter. That is sent via one 60x super-signal to their headquarters. The technology can only work on a group of about a dozen.

(Thanks, William)

Via New Scientist

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