Senor Parrot’s Perch

The Nexi Robot

(Norwood House Press, 2010)

By Toney Allman

The Nexi Robot (Great Idea) by Toney Allman will fascinate you from beginning to end. It relates the quest of MIT robotics professor Cynthia Breazeal to build a social robot, one that learns like a person does and that interacts with people in a social way. Much different than tool and task oriented robots that dominate the robotics field, social robots are designed to learn from people and interact with people, understanding and showing emotions.

Video introduction to Nexi:

Author Toney Allman does a great job of making these complicated ideas understandable and stimulating. Sometimes the author struggles to keep the writing simple all the way through. At times the level is appropriate for a skilled 2nd grade reader, but overall we’re looking at a book aimed at 3rd and 4th graders and up. The format follows a younger reader level, but don’t let kids be put off. They’ll be rewarded with an excellent story about scientific inquiry that is sure to spur their imaginations and help shape their career and educational choices. I recommend this book for any school or public library or for a kid interested in robotics or engineering.

Here is a “Robots to the Rescue”, a short video kids might enjoy staring Nexi and another flying robot. At the end, you’ll see that Nexi looks like it could use a good dose of Visine as it blinks away the smokey sting from its eyes.

Via ExtremeRobot, a star wars styled robot powered by a Legos NXT robot:

I suppose shaking around like that is at least something.

Well, maybe here’s a career for a video gamer with good eye-thumb coordination – RoboSurgeon! At HeraldTribune.com there’s a fascinating article titled For Human Hearts, Renovation by Robot on heart surgery using a robot with tiny arms and hands that wield the sutures and tiny scalpels to make the cuts.

Because of it’s size and dexterity it can operate inside of a human through a much smaller opening. The surgeon twists and fiddles with small controllers attached to the mini surgical samurai to direct its slicing and sewing inside the patient, hence the critical need for that eye-thumb brain connection. The surgeon and spectators watch the entire procedure from the inside the patient via the video delivered by the robot’s miniature camera eye. The manufacturer, Intuitive Surgical, names this robot the da Vinci Si HD System.

Here’s a promo video from their site. The surgeon’s control of the robot is very cool.

There are not many surgeons qualified to operate using a robotic surgeon. There are many others who feel that there are too many risks associated with the procedures at this time. However there are some great advantages. For starters, these robotic mini-surgeons eliminate the need to saw the patient’s sternum in two, and also the subsequent pulling apart of the rib cage in order to make enough room for your surgeon’s hands, which you can imagine, must be at least as big as catcher’s mitts. Then, there is the reduced chance of infection because the surgical area is so much smaller and there is less exposure to airborne microbes. A team of additional medical personnel stand by to immediately pursue traditional surgery should something occur that requires their intervention.

The surgery isn’t perfect and some doctors qualified to perform the surgery won’t do so because of the risks and drawbacks, such as lengthier surgeries and longer time under anesthesia.

I remember when my father underwent a quadruple bypass (when he was my age). His recovery was agony, in part because of the pain of recovery from having his sternum separated. Then, he was limited in what he could lift in order not to put additional pressure on it. I don’t believe that he would have been a candidate, though, because his liver was sufficiently impaired that the anesthesia was a big concern, since it would tax his liver. (Your liver cleans stuff out of your blood, like anesthetic drugs, alcohol, and other goodies.)

So, the upshot is, go ahead, get that kid of yours an Xbox and save a life. That mind-boggling waste of time today may be saving skill of tomorrow. Think of it, your child may someday to become the virtual pilot of a mini anti-cancer submarine swimming through a patient’s veins, zapping cancer cells before they zap another healthy cell. Then, you’ll be proud to proclaim, “It was the video game console we bought him when he was just 8-years old. He almost didn’t graduate from high school, but look at him today!”

This video is from TechRepublic. It shows a robot developed by Boston Dynamics and Sandia National Laboratories for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It’s easy to imagine the military uses for this thing. The landing looks a bit tough for a manned ride-along.

Here is a link to Sandia’s article on the robotic jumping jackaroo.