Gifu University’s Graduate School of Medicine in central Japan now has a new “sick” robot, geared towards medical students.

Keiko, which means ”practice” in Japanese, can answer questions like “How are you doing?”, by saying things like “I get tired easily lately”. The bot will be a great help for medical students practicing conversations with patients.

Keiko can also be used for examinations by touch, before doing the same with human beings, so students are better prepared to touch real patients. Keiko is specifically designed for training neurological disorders so that medical students can learn the ways brain and nervous system illnesses can be identified.

[Crunchgear]

This bot is a long way from dealing a Vegas table, but the objects that it does shuffle are shuffled efficiently I guess. It’s called Robot Partner 2.0 by Slovenian artist Stefan Doepner. It was recently exhibited at the 2008 ARS Electronica Festival. The robot is billed as a robotic “living table installation.” It can shuffle objects around all by itself (I’m thinking magnets) and is intended to demonstrate the “absurdity” of “service-automation.” I don’t know about that, but it’s strangely fascinating to watch. Video below.
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We love and fear robots, but sometimes it doesn’t seem like they heart us back. At this year’s SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, Taisuck Kwon (from the Kyushu Institute of Design) demonstrated his latest work in the realm of “photo real” robots: robots designed to reproduce facial expressions of human beings.

The photo real robots convey emotions with facial features designed to put people at ease, “especially seniors and toddlers.” And though the robots have an underlying mechanical configuration that mimics the muscle structure of the human face, complete with servomotors and actuators used to manipulate “muscles” beneath the “skin”, they just seem to look even more creepy. If I weren’t too busy warning all of you about them, I would run like hell. I do my duty. Plus I’m waiting patiently for more realistic sex robots. Once we reach that plateau, I’ll have my way with a few robot babes, take one with me and head for the hills.

[National Geographic]

Amid the bloody casualties of the robot uprising will be the construction worker. Robot collaborators at the University of South California have developed a robotic gantry that builds walls to almost any shape and specification without ANY manual labor. Plans are put into a computer and the concrete laying machine does it’s thing, able to finish an entire house within a day without a single smoke break or catcall to a passing female.(though it may make rude statements to the occasional passing Prius)

Behrokh Khoshnevis is the brains behind this miracle building machine. It came about after looking into methods of rapid construction as a way to reconstruct areas that had been devastated by natural disasters in his native Iran.

The process is also eco-friendly. Some reports claim that up to seven tons of waste is produced by conventional house building, plus there’s no need for heavy vehicle usage. Video below.
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Dr. Thomas Ings and Professor Lars Chittka from Queen Mary, University of London, are on a mission—scare the crap out of some bees.
In nature, bumblebees and pollinating insects are hunted by crab spiders. These sick bastards lie in wait on flowers, camouflaging themselves, until a bee comes along for them to eat. The research duo sought to discover how a brush with a crab spider would affect the foraging habits of bumblebees.
They tested the situation by setting up robotic crab spiders in varying levels of camo. When an unsuspecting bee landed on a robospider, an optic sensor triggered a little foam claw to snap on the bee and then let it go. Ings and Chittka then used 3D tracking software to monitor the bees’ movements. They found that bees that had been captured were more careful after the incident. The affected bees lost foraging time but also were less likely to land on another spider flower.
Spiders are scary, and robots are scary, so a combination of the two is just horrifying, especially for bumblebees. Wait for robotic crab spiders to displace real crab spiders, and robotic crabs to displace real crabs, and robotic VD clinicians to displace real VD clinicians.

[Telegraph]

So you’ve been jonesin for a robot that can cook you food and wash your filthy body while you sleep.  You have some ideas about how to go about making it, but, aw man, you don’t feel like going through the boring chassis build, the stupid motor calibration, and all the other poopy work that goes into the base of all robots.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just slap a spatula and a loofah on a pre-made robot template?  Well, friends, the uBot offers you salvation at last.  The uBot is a robot base that can be specialized…by you!

Co-founders of DigitRobotics LLC Bryan Thibodeau and Patrick Deegan will market their uBot initially to academia.  Building robots for academic purposes is a quite involved process, so having a template robot to specialize would make things much easier for researchers .
“The uBot balances on two wheels, can pick objects up with its arms, and can interact via Skype using a camera and a computer monitor for a ‘head’.”  The pair is already building three uBots for the MIT Media Lab.  MIT will use the uBot as the body and chassis for Lexi, a social/dexterous/mobile bot that can express emotion.

Ultimately the team plans to market their uBot in the health-care sector.  The uBot prototype currently costs $65,000, but manufacturing efficiency could bring that price down to about $30,000.  Having an in-house robot to care for the elderly at all times could eliminate the need for a nursing home.  And with a $30K price point, the uBot might be a viable alternative to a geriatric rest home.  In a health-care scenario, the uBot would be able to check vital signs, lift someone who has fallen, call an ambulance, clear things out of the way, etc.

Happy 90th birthday grandma, I got you what you always wanted:  a machine in lieu of human interaction.

[Mass High Tech]

New Zealand and Korean scientists have joined forces seeking to develop a robot that can perform some basic duties of a doctor.  The three year project should result in a doctor bot fit for a king.  Or at least fit for the Science and Technology Minister of New Zealand.  Pete Hodgson, who currently holds that position, had his blood pressure taken by a robot and proclaimed it was “an exciting new era”.

Exciting, indeed.  Robot doctors may be able to measure blood pressure and other vital signs, assist fallen patients, deliver medication, and provide companionship to the sick.  The robots should be able to speak and recognize English that they may communicate sufficiently with patients.  We’ve already seen Heart’s care giving abilities, so it’s easy to imagine how the two technologies could merge to offer something similar to a human doctor.  Robotics will clearly play an important role in the field of medicine in the future.

While the next few years may see the advent of robot doctors, it will probably be a while before House is unseated by an automaton (but that would be a cool episode).  Will the cold, oil-soaked heart of a robot ever truly feel sympathy for a weak human patient?

[Stuff] VIA [Gizmo Watch]

Your 3-year-old is about to become a big brother or sister. You can just imagine how that hyperactive tyke will handle a delicate mini-person. In the meantime, while you’re busy trying to guard against bruised babyness, who’s going to spend time with Granny? She gets so lonely in that nursing home.
Lucky for you, Dave McGoran of the University of West England has a solution. The Heart Robot is a tot-sized snuggle-fest who blinks and purrs in response to physical affection. Its heart also lights up and beats. Heart’s grub-like paleness and sad little mouth are a little depressing, but that is far outweighed by its sheer adorableness. Plus, how useful! You can train Little Tot in gentle baby handling, and when the wee one arrives, pass Heart along to Granny for some lovin’.
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The Valtra RoboTrac is a tractor. Sort of. It’s also a robot, and much smaller than the ones you are used to. It’s a fully programmable, automated farmhand that will round out any farm team and make it more productive. That’s because it performs a lot of tasks like tilling, plowing, disking, planting, harrowing, spraying, weeding, and more.

It’s small size is handy because it can work the fields without wrecking them to bits. It will pay for itself in no time since it cuts down on farmhands. A few more bots like this and the farm is going to be a lonely place of boredom, broken only by cows mooing at robots and the occasional UFO picking up Bessie.

[Dvice]

It’s amazing what you can do just by adding Teddy bear ears to familiar things. Do these look like droids to you? Me either. No sir, you’re right, these aren’t the droids I’m looking for.

Hit the link for a look at other Star Wars Be@Rbricks. 16 in all. They all look less menacing and more cuddly, but I have to admit to being fairly creeped out.

[Likecool]