Bear with me. I like to talk around the subject.

Vecna Robotics is interesting. Parent company has fingers in enterprise automation, health-care IT, and bleeding edge research, like RFID, bioinformatics and our old mate, AI.

Vecna’s robotics ‘arm,’ is, well, two arms and some tractor treads hanging off a PR ploy resembling a bear’s head - but only after the brochure explains it.

Hence, too, the importance of a nicely concocted acronym: "Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot.." Oh well, it’s all good marketing fun, can’t pick on them for that.

"The robot’s humanoid body and teddy bear-style head give it a friendly appearance." 

[ I tell ya, Sarg, thet 'bot looks jest like the mother what shot me! ]

"A really important thing when you’re dealing with casualties is trying to maintain that human touch,"

.. says the US army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Centre in Frederick, Maryland. Hmm, nice sentiment, yet with the clang of incongruity. One ponders, after all, what led to casualties in the first place. Anyhoo, where’s the human touch being dragged by the feet through mud by two buddies under fire?

As well you know, I, Dextre, Celebrity Robot (I must keep reminding you, as I’ve heard your memories can fade) am always seeking the hidden truth - aka the ‘back angle’ - and it doesn’t take much reading of Vecna’s sparse web pages on bearbot to reveal the usual suspect, your human agenda:

Although rescuing injured soldiers will be its most important role, Bear’s work will also include mundane tasks such as loading trucks and carrying equipment for soldiers.

The robot will be an integral part of a military team.

Yeah, riiight.

Two other tandem uses for this type of robot loom as massive growth areas.

Vecna proposes the SCI-bear for handling spinal cord injury patient who need steady rotisserie work to forestall pressure ulcers. Immediately one sees all kinds of patient handling as prime territory for robotic people lifters.

Second, the HOMEbear is aimed at similar populations of incapacitated folk struggling at home. Such strugglers will have to bear five years of difficulty for refining the bare technology, more time while the military soak up initial production, then finally stump up the traditional coupla-hundred G’s for one’s personal BearBot.

Normal course of technological dev., not Vecna’s fault.

A final puzzling note. Whilst applauding Vecna’s social spirit (paying 10% of employees time for community projects) I am perplexed at this odd request for donations on the page promoting their military-funded robotics.

Victory first requires deciphering enemy acronyms (DEAs)

Slogans, buzzwords, and acronyms, are essentials of any complex system - denoting a rich culture amongst its cognoscenti - and the military are no slouches in the jargon game.

US Army think-tanks have escalated themselves to leaders of the pack in this skill. In so doing, the common soldier, the human, becomes so abstractly defined as to be indistinguishable from a deployed bipedal field unit, umm, biorobot, err.., cyborg - heck, let the experts speak:

All Soldiers in the Modular Force are part of the Soldier as a System (SaaS) overarching requirement encompassing everything the Soldier wears, carries, and consumes to include unit radios, crew-served weapons, and unit-specific equipment in the execution of tasks and duties.

All Soldiers systems will be treated as an integrated System of Systems (SoS). The Future Combat Systems (FCS) Soldier, as defined by Soldier as a System (SaaS), meets the need to improve the current capability of all Soldiers, regardless of Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), to perform Army Common Tasks and functions more efficiently and effectively.

The "FCS" itself is a glorious acronym-rich obfuscation (ARO) describing a refined system of destruction and killing (RSDK) - preferably of carbon-based units (CBUs), but their techno-lackeys (TLs) can be taken down if robo-jacking (RoJ) proves cost-ineffective (-$).

The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) network allows the FCS Family-of-Systems (FoS) to operate as a cohesive system-of-systems where the whole of its capabilities is greater than the sum of its parts.

As the key to the Army’s transformation, the network, and its logistics and Embedded Training (ET) systems, enable the Future Force to employ revolutionary operational and organizational concepts. The network enables Soldiers to perceive, comprehend, shape, and dominate the future battlefield at unprecedented levels as defined by the FCS Operational Requirements Document (ORD).

Link to milbot central. PS: Don’t forget to download the wargame. And if you are wondering what on Earth the US Army is up to, try this article on ‘dumbing down the army.’

Child’s Dream Comes True

Robot musculature is the obvious alternative to mechanical actuators.

No amount of clockwork-sophistication will protect one’s personal mechabot from the smear and stigma attached to being ‘kinetically challenged." Such kenisic taunts will send early model personal assistants (PAbots) into premature and possibly permanent CPU denial (blue screen).

Aside from biological muscles or motors, pistons and levers, Electroactive Polymers (’EAP’s in the trade) are a hot line of research which is pursuing two directions based on the activation: electronic (driven by electric field) and ionic (mobility of ions).

Electronic polymers like electrostrictive, electrostatic, piezoelectric, and ferroelectric demand high field potentials close to their dielectric breakdown, while ionic EAPs like gels, polymer-metal composites, conductive polymers, and carbon nanotubes - though low-voltage media - must maintain wetness.

Not a problem, the latter, for we wetbots but a downer for the lab scientist. Enter promising breakthrough, for lightweight bots, at least.

Inha University in South Korea has demonstrated cellulose - lightweight, inexpensive, low power requirements - made electrically active by dissolving paper pulp, forming it into sheets, and coating it with a layer of gold as an electrode, ‘actuates’ with considerable promise for lightweight robotic forms, either crawling or wing-flapping critters.

Some areas of the cellulose film are highly ordered, while in other areas, the cellulose strands are tangled like spaghetti. The movement of ions through the paper — and the movement of cellulose strands themselves, which have negative and positively charged ends — causes the paper to bend in response to an electrical current. The bending is driven by the ordered regions, but free space in disordered regions allows ions to flow more freely and adds to the paper’s ability to deform.

Professor Jaehwan Kim, with Zoubeida Ounaies at Texas AMU, are working to strengthen "smart" cellulose with carbon nanotubes employing their high electrical conductivity and strength. The aim is films of cellulose strands intimately tangled with carbon nanotubes will exert more force than pure cellulose films.

Says Jaehwan Kim, associate professor at the university, EAPs "offer capabilities that are currently considered science fiction. EAP are able to offer a range of performance and characteristics that may not be reproduced or replicated by other technologies."

The attention-grabbing headline "microwave-powered flapping wing" ultra-lightweight, low power, flexible, damage tolerant, noiseless, and agile ‘robots’ has swamped the equally startling and inspired potential others:
- tactile interface and active tactile display device for reading by the blind;
- inflatable space structures, inflatable antenna experiment, ultra-light weight solar arrays and large telescopes;
- biologically inspired and insect-like robots, in agriculture and ecology, toys and animatronics for entertainment industry;
- biological muscle augmentation, miniature in-vivo robots for diagnostics and microsurgery, active bandage and anti-G suits;
- noise control of aircraft cabins, automobiles, ships, buildings, and smart wall papers;
- MEMS, micropumps, valves.

Nothing new under the sun, I always say. Vis this ancient (yet to be dated - guessing circa 1910-20) hygroscopic cellophane magic fish:

Video blank or not playing? You either have JavaScript turned of or, more likely, an older version of Macromedia’s Flash Player. Click here to get the latest Flash player.

[The inscription on the Cadbury's fish reads: "Place the fish on the palm of your hand & it comes to life" ]

ATR and Honda successfully demonstrated a brain-machine interface to manipulate robots using human brain activity, by decoding MRI-based neural decoding, hence without surgical implants.

Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (“ATR”) and Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. (“HRI”) have collaboratively developed a new “Brain Machine Interface” (“BMI”) with the apparent ultimate goal of manipulating robots by Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs), much as humans are manipulated in today’s society.

A World Honda news release cites "a highly acclaimed article titled Decoding the perceptual and subjective contents of the human brain by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a researcher at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, which recently appeared in a leading science journal, Nature Neuroscience.

"For this study, Dr. Kamitani was named by Scientific American magazine as Research Leader, with his collaborator Dr. Frank Tong at Vanderbilt University, within the 2005 Scientific American 50 – the magazine’s prestigious annual list that recognizes outstanding acts of leadership in science and technology. HRI and ATR have developed the article’s theory into a system for real-time brain activity decoding and robotic control.

"This research reveals that MRI-based neural decoding can allow a robot hand to mimic the subject’s finger movements (“paper-rock-scissors”) by tracking the hemodynamic responses in the brain. Although there is an approximate 7-second time lag between the subject’s movement and the robot’s mimicking movement, the researchers succeeded in gaining a decoding accuracy of 85%."

The article boasts "No Surgery Required - In conventional BMI research efforts led by U.S. neuroscientists, invasive technologies, including electrode array implants, have been used. If advanced non-invasive BMI becomes available, users will be free from the physical burden of a surgical procedure."

No, just a coupla million bucks worth of Magnetic Resonance Imaging hardware in your shoulder bag. [I know, early days yet, proof of concept, yada]

Honda’s name is prevalent in robotics news. Their strategy is blatant - to flog Asimos. "Would you like to upsize your Integra with an Asimo chauffeur for just $100K sir - or $2 million for the MRI helmet?"

I would, and alway do, love to wax philosophical but neither space nor brain power permit, so I shall gently nudge you over to Luciano Floridi for some.

[Flashback]

Personal taste issue, I enjoy Pierce Brosnan’s take on cliched-iconic James Bond. So no surprise to find me watching his series again only a few weeks ago.

That scene with the laser-zappin’ robot - it never crossed my mind (perhaps for not the fourth time) the robot was a real industrial device - till I read this 4-yo press release.

Consider it re-released:

The decision to choose KUKA robots for "Die Another Day" was based not only on the robots’ manoeuvrability and exceptional good looks, but also on the speed with which they could be installed and the professional design and support package combined with the highest quality.

KUKA Roboter is delighted to be cooperating with the Bond team and actors Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry in one of the boldest and most imaginative productions making use of robot technology in film history to date, which is providing KUKA with a promising springboard into the entertainment industry.

KUKA Roboter GmbH is a company in the IWKA Aktiengesellschaft and ranks among the world’s leading manufacturers of industrial robots, and in 2001 output in excess of 7,300 robots.

Yowsers.

Under the sharpest knife in the drawer

CyberKnife in action is one of the world’s most impressive and awe-inspiring robots. In full flight he resembles a waiter waving a tray of human hors d’oeuvres and brandishing a beautifully sculpted bottle of the best white sauce .. no, wait, that’s his head and he’s eyeing the appetizer, err, human, unnervingly.

"Driven by intelligent robotics" - not, unfortunately, a brilliant surgeon and great conversationalist, but at the very least penultimate feedback:

A complete, intelligent robotic system that constantly images, analyzes, tracks, and corrects .. both referencing skeletal data AND allowing for respiratory motion.

‘Corrects’ - that sounds good.

The ‘awesomeness’ derives from knowing this is a surgical robot, delivering minute and supremely accurate little death rays to evil cancerous invaders within the patient.

If you’re smarter than this editor (that’s most of you) and frustrated by dumb-downs, here are some links to med-PR, so knock yourselves out:

Accuray’s CyberKnife FAQ

Spine-tracking system ensuring millimeter accuracy: Xsight

Allowing patients to breathe normally: Synchrony

CyberKnife in action ** Since I couldn’t play them from Accuray’s site, even with Windows MP11, try these videos at the CyberKnife Society website.

Accuray Incorporated, announced (May24, 2006) clinical study results demonstrate CyberKnife® Robotic Radiosurgery System effective option for prostate tumors. Ref: Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences at American Urological Association (AUA) 2006 Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

Common treatment options for prostate cancer include surgery or hypofractionated radiation therapy - both invasive procedures requiring hospital stays, while CyberKnife’s System is a minimally invasive out-patient procedure.

.. put no foot wrong

Ossur - developer of scientifically advanced orthopedics - has launched a new website dedicated to exploring the present and future of bionics, as well as the significant role played by its Bionic Technology platform

Ossur’s artificial limbs include RHEO KNEE™, which combines artificial intelligence with microprocessor technology, and POWER KNEE™ "a prosthetic knee system so smart that it automatically adapts to an individual’s walking style and environment, learning continuously and optimizing control over time."

The RHEO KNEE is the world’s first microprocessor swing and stance knee system to utilize the power of artificial intelligence. Capable of independent thought, it learns how the user walks, recognizing and responding  immediately to changes in speed, load and terrain."

Needless to say, orders are flooding in from Terminators damaged during the filming of those movies.