It’s an exciting time for the field of robotics, with new robots popping up in medicine, the military, industrial settings and homes nearly every week (see my Year in Robots for some of the highlights of 2008.)
2009 started off with some amazing stuff, largely military driven. Scientists under DARPA have, for the first time, wirelessly controlled the flight of a living beetle by fitting it with a microprocessor, radio receiver and battery along with electrodes. (See my colleague’s article, The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle for details—there’s also a stunning video.) Beetles and other insects are already efficient fliers, and controlling them has been appealing as an alternative to developing tiny fliers from scratch. Insect-like robots are a challenge because of their small scale—generally robots need a heavy payload, such as sensors and a power source, to be useful. (Robert Wood over at Harvard has created some of the smallest artificial fliers by using a novel fabrication system.)
Cyborg people may not be far off either. Sally Adee wrote a compelling account for the IEEE Spectrum on the revolution in prosthetics—tracing the first truly neurally-controlled prosthetic, made by DARPA.
Robots have been aiding doctors more and more—snakelike robots are all the rage because their flexibility and versatility can make it easier to diagnose the body inside and out. Now researchers have equipped a robotic snake onto a stretcher for soldiers in the battlefield. With the snake (a spin off of snakelike robots for heart surgery I wrote about about last year), medics may be able to remotely check for breathing, deliver oxygen and potentially scan for internal bleeding (see A Robomedic for the Battlefield for more).
Aside from surveillance and medical robots, robots made for the darker purpose of automated warfare have also been rapidly advancing. A new book called Wired for War details this trend. (See an earlier post, Automated Battlefields, for an overview of war robots.) Its author, Peter Singer, was quoted in a recent Physorg article saying, “We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb.” I’ve just gotten a copy of the book, and I’ll review it here in a few days.
Wired’s War Room has some excellent coverage of battle bots as well, and this posting mentions a California Polytechnic State University report that investigates ethics for war robots, even suggesting that we need rights for robots!
