Robotic arms have been used in medical procedures for a while now, providing surgeons a level of steadiness and precision that few human hands can replicate. Now, however, things are moving forward to a future where these robot arms will be able to perform such operations almost entirely on their own.

At the present we are only talking about biopsies, or dealing with dead patients. A safe way to start, but scientists at the Duke University in North Carolina have already seen these robots achieve a 93% success rate when cutting into prostate tissue. A dead turkey, whose flesh has a similar texture to humans, was used in the experiments. The robotic arms used ultrasound to locate the exact placement of the organs, and then took real-time 3D information which told them what to do next.

The leader of the team, Professor Stephen Smith, explained that the next test they will undertake is to try out the arm on a human mannequin. This dummy will have a “stiff bra cup” with a grape embedded inside, to mimic a cancerous lesion. The robot’s job will be to remove this lesion while following correct medical procedure and saving the person’s life (theoretically). One of the main problems that will need to be addressed is improving the robots’ speed when it comes to obtaining and processing the data from the ultrasounds, but a more powerful processor and a more effective algorithm can help overcome this challenge.

The professor is hopeful that success in these tests will pave the way for a lot more robots doing surgeries on their own, not just biopsies. This would save patients time and money, which is one of the biggest problems in the healthcare industry today. Hopefully, they’ll be able to offer some type of medical guarantee as well.

A brief video showing a medical robot undergoing trials follows.



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Robots have been good at keeping our floors clean and some have started working as receptionists but the household robots of our dreams are still far from real. Researchers, however, are slowly but surely making small steps towards the development of a general purpose, household robot. Pieter Abbeel and his students at the University of Berkley and in collaboration with Willow Garage have developed a new algorithm that allows a humanoid robot to fold towels, a very challenging task.

In the past, many researchers have shown how a robot can pick-up and manipulate rigid objects. The Berkley researchers have now developed a method for determining the corner points of a non-rigid object useful for grasping it and then using the PR2 showed how it works in having the robot fold towels left on a table.

This is how it works,

The robot begins by picking up a randomly dropped towel from a table, goes through a sequence of vision-based re-grasps and manipulations—partially in the air, partially on the table—and finally stacks the folded towel in a target location. The reliability and robustness of our algorithm enables for the first time a robot with general purpose manipulators to reliably and fully-autonomously fold previously unseen towels, demonstrating success on all 50 out of 50 single-towel trials as well as on a pile of 5 towels.

Sounds good doesn't it? Other than the fact that it takes the robot a considerable amount of time to complete its task (on average it takes the PR2 nearly 1500 seconds to fold a towel) this is one of the coolest robot manipulation demos I have seen recently. If they can get the PR2 to wash my dishes, do my laundry, vacuum my floors, cook my dinner, pick-up my groceries, and walk my dog, then I will be a very happy man (I would also have more time to update this blog :) ).

You can watch the robot in action in the video below.