A Colorado man made history at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) this summer when he became the first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear and simultaneously control two of the Laboratory’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs.

Most importantly, Les Baugh, who lost both arms in an electrical accident 40 years ago, was able to operate the system by simply thinking about moving his limbs, performing a variety of tasks during a short training period. These Prosthetic Robot Arms are opening gates to new human cyborgs.

One other DARPA-funded robotic limb controlled by thoughts alone — actually make that two, because Colorado man Les Baugh had two bionic arms attached from shoulder level. Baugh got them this summer, 40 years after losing both arms, as part of a Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program test run at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The project’s researchers have been developing these Modular Prosthetic Limbs (MPL) over the past decade, but they say Baugh is the “first bilateral shoulder-level amputee” to wear two MPLs at the same time. Unlike Jan Scheuermann who controlled a robotic arm with a pair of neural implants, though, Baugh had to undergo a procedure called targeted muscle reinnervation, which reassigned the nerves that once controlled his arms and hands.

Once that was done, the team recorded the patterns his brain makes for each muscle he moves, and then they had him control virtual arms to prepare for the real things. Since his arms were cut off from the shoulder, they also had to design a custom socket for his torso where the prosthetics can be attached. All their preparations were worth it in the end, though, as Baugh turned out to be a brilliant test subject: after just 10 days of training, he was already moving cups from one shelf to the other just by thinking it.

Resources

© 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory LLC. All rights reserved.

http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2014/141216.asp

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/18/double-amputee-mind-controlled-robot-arms/

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It’s a story about the evolving relationship between humans and robots, and what AI in machines bodes for the future of war and the human race.

Resources

Read Now: The Evil ‘Star Wars’ Robot Who Owns the Term ‘Meatbag’ – http://bit.ly/1Hy6KLU
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WildCat is a four-legged robot being developed to run fast on all types of terrain. So far WildCat has run at about 16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits. The video shows WildCat’s best performance so far. WildCat is being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA’s M3 program.

Resources

For more information about WIldCat visit our website at www.BostonDynamics.com.

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This partially 3D-printed prototype can be produced for less than $1,000, much less than commercial utility line robots.

You only need to experience another blackout for a reminder of the importance of power grid maintenance. Robots that crawl along and inspect power lines could save utilities a bundle in preventive checks.  We’ve seen a few designs for machines that can take on this dangerous and tricky job, such as Hydro-Quebec’s LineScout, but they can still cost tens of thousands of dollars. Engineers at the University of California at San Diego have developed a cheap and fast wire-crawling inspection robot called the SkySweeper. Made of off-the-shelf electronics and 3D-printed parts , the basic bot can be produced for less than $1,000.

The V-shaped bot hangs from a wire and works around a spring-elastic elbow joint. It moves along like an upside-down inchworm as its cable-hugging clamps open and close. It’s a basic prototype with a lithium-polymer battery and an Arduino controller, yet it can be augmented with cameras for inspection or induction coils to grab power from the line. That could let it stay aloft on the grid for months at a time.

If it faces a support bracket or other obstacle along the cable, SkySweeper can do a back flip to get past it. “Current line inspection robots are large, complex, and expensive,” Nick Morozovsky, a UCSD mechanical engineering grad student who designed the robot, said in a release. “Utility companies may also use manned or unmanned helicopters equipped with infrared imaging to inspect lines. This is much simpler.” Morozovsky will present the robot at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2013) in November in Tokyo, and also has it as an entry in the Road to Maker Faire Challenge.

Mechanical engineers at the University of California, San Diego invented a robot designed to scoot along utility lines, searching for damage and other problems that require repairs. Made of off-the-shelf electronics and plastic parts printed on an inexpensive 3D printer, the SkySweeper prototype could be scaled up for less than $1,000, making it significantly more economical than the two models of robots currently used to inspect power lines.

“Current line inspection robots are large, complex, and expensive. Utility companies may also use manned or unmanned helicopters equipped with infrared imaging to inspect lines,” said Nick Morozovsky, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at UC San Diego, who designed the robot. “This is much simpler.”

About The SkySweeper Project

By: Nick Morozovsky, Roboticist
Description:  SkySweeper is designed to move along rope or cable like no other robot. Existing robots that inspect power lines are large, slow, and expensive. SkySweeper is small, fast, and almost all parts of the robot are 3D printed or available cheaply off-the-shelf.

Hobby servos move the clamps on either end to one of three positions: either open, partially closed such that the clamp can roll along the cable, or fully closed such that the clamp can only pivot on the cable. A motor at the “elbow” joint of the robot is connected to a spring, together the motor and spring are called a Series Elastic Actuator (SEA), which can both change the angle between the links and store potential energy in the spring when both clamps are locked on the cable.

Sensors measure the angle between the links, how much energy is stored in the spring, and if a cable is within reach of each clamp. The robot is controlled with a finite state machine controller programmed as a switch structure on an Arduino Uno. A lithium polymer battery powers the motors, sensors, and Arduino.

SkySweeper can move along cable in multiple different ways. It can “inchworm” along by opening and closing its links and controlling which clamp is rolling or only pivoting. If SkySweeper needs to avoid an obstacle on the cable, like a support holding onto the cable, it can do a backflip to get past the obstacle, it can even keep on backflipping along the cable!

Morozovsky, who works in the lab of Professor Thomas Bewley at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, will introduce the robot at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, also known as IROS 2013, from Nov. 3 to 8 in Tokyo. He will also present a paper, titled “A Low Degrees of Freedom, Dynamic High Wire Robot,” at the conference.

Resource Links:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597264-1/low-cost-skysweeper-inspection-robot-scoots-along-power-lines/

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1352

http://review.wizehive.com/voting/view/makermedia2013/15849/1387186/0

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Surgery to relieve the damaging pressure caused by hemorrhaging in the brain is a perfect job for a robot. That is the basic premise of a new image-guided surgical system under development at Vanderbilt University. It employs steerable needles about the size of those used for biopsies to penetrate the brain with minimal damage and suction away the blood clot that has formed.The system is described in an article accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. It is the product of an ongoing collaboration between a team of engineers and physicians headed by Assistant Professor Robert J. Webster III and Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery Kyle Weaver.

Brain clots are leading cause of death, disability

The odds of a person getting an intracerebral hemorrhage are one in 50 over his or her lifetime. When it does occur, 40 percent of the individuals die within a month. Many of the survivors have serious brain damage.
“When I was in college, my dad had a brain hemorrhage,” said Webster. “Fortunately, he was one of the lucky few who survived and recovered fully. I’m glad I didn’t know how high his odds of death or severe brain damage were at the time, or else I would have been even more scared than I already was.”

Steerable needle could prevent “collateral damage” during surgery
Operations to “debulk” intracerebral hemorrhages are not popular among neurosurgeons: They know their efforts are not likely to make a difference, except when the clots are small and lie on the brain’s surface where they are easy to reach. Surgeons generally agree that there is a clinical benefit from removing 25-50 percent of a clot but that benefit can be offset by the damage that is done to the surrounding tissue when the clot is removed. Therefore, when a serious clot is detected in the brain, doctors take a “watchful waiting” approach – administering drugs that decrease the swelling around the clot in hopes that this will be enough to make the patient improve without surgery.

For the last four years, Webster’s team has been developing a steerable needle system for “transnasal” surgery: operations to remove tumors in the pituitary gland and at the skull base that traditionally involve cutting large openings in a patient’s skull and/or face. Studies have shown that using an endoscope to go through the nasal cavity is less traumatic, but the procedure is so difficult that only a handful of surgeons have mastered it.

Last summer, Webster attended a conference in Italy where one of the speakers, Marc Simard, a neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, ran through his wish list of useful imaginary neurosurgical devices, hoping that some engineer in the audience might one day be able to build one of them. When he described his wish to have a needle-sized robot arm to reach deep into the brain to remove clots, Webster couldn’t help smiling because the steerable needle system he had been developing was perfect for the job.

Webster’s design, which he calls an active cannula, consists of a series of thin, nested tubes. Each tube has a different intrinsic curvature. By precisely rotating, extending and retracting these tubes, an operator can steer the tip in different directions, allowing it to follow a curving path through the body. The single needle system required for removing brain clots was actually much simpler than the multi-needle transnasal system.

I think this can save a lot of lives.When Webster returned, he told Weaver about the potential new application. The neurosurgeon was quite supportive: “I think this can save a lot of lives. There are a tremendous number of intracerebral hemorrhages and the number is certain to increase as the population ages.”

Graduate student Philip Swaney, who is working on the system, likes the fact it is closest to commercialization of all the projects in Webster’s Medical and Electromechanical Design Laboratory. “I like the idea of working on something that will begin saving lives in the very near future,” he said.

Active cannula removed 92 percent of clots in simulations
The brain-clot system only needs two tubes: a straight outer tube and a curved inner tube. Both are less than one twentieth of an inch in diameter. When a CT scan has determined the location of the blood clot, the surgeon determines the best point on the skull and the proper insertion angle for the probe. The angle is dialed into a fixture, called a trajectory stem, which is attached to the skull immediately above a small hole that has been drilled to enable the needle to pass into the patient’s brain.

The surgeon positions the robot so it can insert the straight outer tube through the trajectory stem and into the brain. He also selects the small inner tube with the curvature that best matches the size and shape of the clot, attaches a suction pump to its external end and places it in the outer tube.

Guided by the CT scan, the robot inserts the outer tube into the brain until it reaches the outer surface of the clot. Then it extends the curved, inner tube into the clot’s interior. The pump is turned on and the tube begins acting like a tiny vacuum cleaner, sucking out the material. The robot moves the tip around the interior of the clot, controlling its motion by rotating, extending and retracting the tubes. According to the feasibility studies the researchers have performed, the robot can remove up to 92 percent of simulated blood clots.

“The trickiest part of the operation comes after you have removed a substantial amount of the clot. External pressure can cause the edges of the clot to partially collapse making it difficult to keep track of the clot’s boundaries,” said Webster. The goal of a future project is to add ultrasound imaging combined with a computer model of how brain tissue deforms to ensure that all of the desired clot material can be removed safely and effectively.

Source

By David Salisbury, Vanderbilt University

Links

http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/robotics/newsid=31772.php#ixzz2bVYo7TZe

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By integrating these top loader FANUC R-2000iB Material Handling “flying robots” on a overhead rail, separate fixed automation can be removed at each of the CNC machining centers. In the traditional configuration, each machining center had a linear gantry deliver camshafts to and from a conveyor on the shop floor. In this new design, overhead robots pick up and deliver parts from cell to cell. Each movement to the machining center includes removal of a finished part and delivery of a raw part.

The traditional design also required hundreds of feet of fixed floor conveyors to feed the machining cells. The new configuration by TranTek eliminates the entire conveyor system, freeing up valuable floor space. With the conveyors removed, operators and quality control personnel can move freely around the machine centers.

But one of the biggest benefits is capital equipment flexibility. The CNC machining cells can be upgraded or replaced without changing the automation system. Because the FANUC R-2000iB robots can be programmed for variable part positioning, exact machine location and alignment is no longer critical. The manufacturer also has the flexibility to re-use the automation and install a completely different line in the future.

The FANUC robot programming by TranTek engineers also includes the ability to “park” one robot and use a single robot to feed all machining centers. This feature virtually insures there will be no downtime in the system.

All of the engineering, design, and functionality of the system was provided by TranTek Automation. By integrating standard automation products, and by simulating reach studies and cycle times in advance, a faster design/build cycle was accomplished. To learn more about TranTek’s full line of robotically integrated automation systems,

please visit their website at http://www.trantekautomation.com.

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Video Link:

http://youtu.be/2Ysb-Oko3Bg

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For more information, please visit
www.inspectorbots.com

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