Pretensions recently attended a Science in the Cafe event featuring a talk by Prof. Oussama Khatib from the School of Computer Science at Stanford University.

The affable Khatib took the opportunity to show off his haptic device which allowed users to move a virtual ball around the screen and “feel” the texture of a membrane by pushing the ball against and ultimately through it.

P also played with computerised textures, where you could run a cursor over simulated corrugated iron and “feel” the corrugations.

Prof. Khatib informed us that the seemingly frivolous tool had real applications in many fields, such as for remote surgery, where it would allow the surgeon to feel a virtual organ when cutting into it. Robots could also ease difficult surgery for example robotic catheter technology has been used to facilitate the insertion of a long catheter from the leg vein into the heart.

A Stanford spinoff company called Hansen Medical has a new robot called Sensei, which can treat atrial fibrillation, a common heart disorder, in a non-invasive fashion. The robot allows the stable positioning of wires and tubes into the heart, so as to deliver a precisely tuned pulse of energy to destroy the misfiring heart muscles.

The scientist then treated the audience to a video presentation that took P through several centuries of robotics, from the time of Leonardo da Vinci (who developed designs for a robot knight) onwards.  P was particularly impressed with the 18th century automatons that could play the organ semi-convincingly and even write (see video below, in french sorry)!

Obviously things have come a long way since then, but many of the basic challenges remain, such as:

• Sensing – how can the robot detect reality?
• Planning/Control – how does it plan its response?
• Human-Robot Interactions – the robot needs to be able to interact with humans safely but this tends to compromise performance
• Mechanisms/Actuation – how to actually make the robot move/respond

There have also been some interesting developments lately that might not be robots per se but draw directly on the technology, like this Japanese robotic exoskeleton (allows the wearer to lift heavy loads).