I saw lots of robots moving about the floor, some small, some as tall as met and looking sort of human like. A former colleague from Mitsubishi lab showed me a video of his "little" round robots that change colors and form into groups to represent an image (like a fish swimming in the sea). They act like a small animation!
An aerial robot that won a best paper award for the technical institute in Zurich. Below is my robot which I discussed in my paper.
I heard two general talks, one about the nuclear disaster in Japan, and one about robots in medicine that others may find interesting. Robots turned out to be very useful in the Tokyo nuclear plant that had meltdowns after the tsunami. They are being used to provide video data to humans who are safely away, to do some cleanup of debris from roof damage and the like. No one ever planned to use robots this way, but luckily some robots can operate in high radiation circumstances (again they weren't designed with that in mind--it's just lucky.) The robots are mostly American, which is very embarassing to the Japanese robotics community (but personally I don't think they should have been embarassed--it was just luck that someone had the right stuff). But what shocked me was how long it will be before the plant is safe. At present there is still high radiation leakage in one direction from the plant to an area of 8 km near the plant. And it will be 30 years before they can fully repair the broken tanks, with the assumption that they can do new research needed on how to use robots to actually fix the facility (it will not be possible for humans to ever enter it). That talk made it clear to me that nuclear plants must be designed to have a way to use robots to make repairs in the case of meltdowns. Meltdowns will happen and robots are the only safe way to do it!
The second talk was about robots in medicine. As I already knew, robots in surgery in the world are very valuable tools. They can do all kinds of cuts very precisely, as well as clamp off in tricky spots. Mostly the robots are just robot arms and they are controlled by surgeons. But as time goes by, they will do some things without surgeons directing them completely. Other uses of robots are small pills that you swallow that can search for polyps and cancers in the intestines (that is already a reality, which I did not know). The hope is that they will eventually have tiny legs, so that they can swim and crawl in various parts of the stomach and intestines. And eventually to have a tiny knife so that doctors can make cuts without opening the body. Other uses of very small cutting tools will make it possible to do scarless surgery. So there will be robots in the body probably before there are really useful ones (other than vacuum cleaner robots) in our houses.
Of course conferences aren't all talks. I met a number of my colleagues from around the world in the hallways, and had dinner with a few of them. That part is of course great fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment