By Jordan Williams
Robots will be coming
to a home near you.
Introduced into society
around 1962, robots were intentionally designed for handling heavy object in
the automotive industry. But in the foreseeable future robotic technology will
be capable of much more, said Henrik Christensen, the director of the Robotic
and Intelligent Machines Center at Georgia Tech.
Christensen said there
has been a tremendous evolution in robotics over the last 50 years and in the
future robots will be available for the elderly to live out their lives in
their own household instead of a retirement home.
“So I’m saying by the
time I retire I will have a robot that will me assist to get out of bed, get
dressed, take a shower, go to the restroom and prepare a meal,” he said. “And
things like going to the restroom is something I would like to not have to rely
on other people to be able to do that.”
However, the programming for future robots will be different, Christensen said. Robots will be trained
how parents train their children.
“So we teach (robots)
to do particular things by showing them,” he said. “If I want them to be able
to prepare a meal for me I can show how to prepare a meal and it will know how
to prepare a meal in the future. If I’m going to try to assemble a car I will
show it how to assemble a car and now it’s your turn.”
At Doctors Hospital of
Augusta surgeons have been assisted by robotic technology since 2005, said
Angela Taylor, the Service Line Director of the Human Motions Institute and
Pelvic Health.
“The robot is a tool,”
Taylor said. “We use them in our surgeries for gynecological surgeries and
general surgeries. And it’s to enhance the surgeons ability to perform the
surgery minimally invasively.”
The benefits of
surgeons using robotics tools is that patients receive a smaller incision,
Taylor said. The smaller incision results in less blood loss and a quicker
recovery.
Taylor said this new
innovative tool put the surgeon’s hands at the controls of the robotic
platform.
“There is a console, is
what it’s called,” Taylor said about how the robotic tool is controlled. “When
a patient gets rolled into the operating room the robot is faced over the
patient, and they make the incisions for the arms of the robot and the tools
that are on the arms of the robot to be placed into the patient.”
At Worcester
Polytechnic Institute a team of students, professors and professional engineers
entered the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) robotics
challenge under the team name WPI Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS).
Team member Felipe Polido
said the robotic challenge is a competition of robot systems and software team
contending to develop robots that can assist people in natural and man-made
disasters.
Polido said his team
received a 6 foot tall and 330 pound robot named Atlas from the engineering and
robotics design company Boston Dynamic, and team WRECS was responsible for
developing the software.
“We developed the robot
to be able to pick up debris so if you have a pile of debris on the ground it
could crawl down and pick them up,” he said. “It has the ability to be able to
go through doors so it can actually open a handle and walk through a door.”
In the competition team
WRECS finished seventh out of 30 teams and were allowed to move on to the next
phase of the contest, Polido said. The team now has an extra year to continue
developing Atlas and prepare for the finals in the spring of next year.
“We’re starting to
develop a lot more features and improving the features we have,” Polido said.
“Last year we only had five months from picking up the robots to competing so
we had to do a lot of short cuts and now we’re trying to go through those and
make them proper.”
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