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DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer
mattnyc99 writes "DARPATech, the Pentagon research arm's annual R&D free-for-all, has some pretty groundbreaking stuff on display this year: the first portable, self-contained robotic surgeon (which a Defense Dept. scientist said would be deployed by 2009), plus a breath-testing gadget that can scan for multiple diseases (including breast cancer) and three new autonomous 'bots that reflect the Pentagon's increasing need for autonomous machinery as the IED-filled Iraq war continues."
Looks good...
From the article:
One of the first announcements at this year's three-day DARPATech conference is going to be hard to top: the first portable, self-contained surgical robot will be deployed in the next two years. Brett Giroir, director of the research agency's Defense Sciences Office also announced that the system, called Trauma Pod, has successfully "treated" a mannequin during a test, with no complications.
A mannequin is already dead. If the robot made some fatal minute error, wouldn't that be a lot more difficult to tell with a mannequin? Sure, better to practice and perfect on a dummy, but this comment FTA seems kinda strange.
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from TFA "Brett Giroir, director of the research agency's Defense Sciences Office also announced that the system, called Trauma Pod, has successfully "treated" a mannequin during a test, with no complications."
thats great! now you try and persuade a human to step inside.... gives a whole new meaning to blue screen of death.
When I was a little guy, I was taught that technology will be used to free workers from tedious and dangerous tasks by allowing unfeeling robots to take our places. This would lead to better jobs for those displaced. Instead of welding safety glass to car doors, we'd be building the robots who would do that. Automation, it was said, leads to a better quality of life for humans. Imagine! No more lost fingers from defective bandsaws. No more horrific scarification from spilled chemicals. Let the robots take those jobs, and let us humans reap the benefits.
But what we got instead was robots taking our jobs without a safety net for the displaced workers. Humans, it seems, don't fit in the future. Oh, they are necessary insofar as they are active consumers, and we can't let those displaced people starve to death or watch only broadcast TV or drive a 5 year old car. No, those displaced workers ceased to be humans and became consumers, feeders of the machines. The machines work to produce stuff which the humans don't have enough money to buy. So the solution, obviously, is to create more robots to bring the prices down. The solution begets the problem.
When it is as easy to kill your enemy as it is to press the yellow button on your XBox control pad, you've eliminated 50% of the horrors of war. When it is no longer difficult to kill another human being because the killer is so far removed from the killed, neither human has any more value than the rapidly blinking pixels on the viewscreen.
We fight wars so that we don't have to fight them again. The horror of war, the firsthand experience of pulling the trigger and ending another human life, the trauma of hitting and being hit, the pain of a friend falling next to you. These are all deterrents to war. The pain that each soldier goes through is a powerful reminder that war is not something to be entered into lightly.
Automate the killing, and the workers will be out of their jobs. It is precisely those workers that we need to be there to tell us to try one more time at diplomacy, to evaluate one more time our priorities, to stand there and be living and dead proof that the thing on the other side of the gun barrel is a human.
You start with:
When I was a little guy, I was taught that technology will be used to free workers from tedious and dangerous tasks by allowing unfeeling robots to take our places.
But you don't want robot soldiers? Isn't that a dangerous task?
(I also think you should have attributed Marshall Brain).
And yet people whose lives are lucky enough to be touched by technology have, at least on average, a better standard of living than their ancestors, live longer etc etc
Somehow your horror story doesn't add up.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
While robot marines and autonomous machines such as the ones displayed will help the army maintain technological strength over the long-term, I can't help but wonder if they are wasting A LOT of our money. If you look at the hundreds of billions which has been spent on Stealth technology over the past couple of decades, it is pretty impossible to claim even a fraction of that amount has transferred into actual military value.
The fact of the matter is that that in most situtations (the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam wars being good examples) that Stealth technology is all but pointless because there is no need for it (i.e. enemy anti-air infrastructure has already been destroyed). Even the few of occasions it has been used though (e.g. the Bosnian war and exercises) the stealth technology has only worked part of the time. If you remember in the Bosnian war, stealth aircraft were still able to be shot down, and that was using cold-war era Russian equipment not even designed to combat stealth aircraft.
It isn't difficult to envisage in 10 years time the army neglecting their robotics as almost useless, in the same way most of the hundreds of billions spent on stealth technology is being disregarded as almost useless in "the war on terror".
I bet Lockhead Martin and the other defense contractors aren't complaining though, our tax dollars keep their industry a highly paid one!
I really hope that robotic surgeons and doctors spell the end for crappy hospital-themed TV series.
Or transform them into awesome series about robots waging war on each other.
and I couldn't help but think of the other bot they've got for evacuating injured soldiers from the battlefield (the one with a bears head)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
why not combine the two?
to wake up and find your being operated on by a robot with a giant bear head
So my question is this, why does the lifestyle changing medical breath test device have to get it's funding from CounterTerrorism? Shouldn't there maybe be a well funded medical program somewhere? Possibly making life saving devices like these, without being forced to kowtow to some military use constraints?
Cuz we all know that the main goal of our medical technology companies today is to keep people sick, and therefore paying...
The cancer scanner reminds me of the time that Dr. Romano diagnosed Dana Scully's cancer by trying to eat her right after the Super Bowl. Good times.
ng
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
Hmmmm, just seems odd that its the military and not health care or any other foundation that receives millions a year that developed these gadgets. You'd think that medical professionals would want to develop a quick and cheap (for the patient) way of performing surgery/testing for diseases sooner, no? Oh wait! Then they couldn't make as much money, right...
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."
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of /.-ers whining about the agency (DARPA) directly responsible for the invention of the Internet, using the Internet.
Think of all the code you have written over the years. Now imagine a "harmless" off by one error, or a mismatch in units between standard and metric.
Now climb up in that chair, and let the robot barber give you a shave and a haircut!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I found a vid of the MAV - looks like one of the surveillance drones in Half Life 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZht4Qvjorg
Namaste
That other Americans are now seeing that little as being achieved and lives are actually being wasted (and worse, American lives!) isn't something to blame on an "anti-war crowd", it's just a self evident fact. (Personally I think that you bought into this mad scheme and should stick it out).
It's the pro war crowd who misled the American people into believing that arms-length combat, "shock and awe", smart bombs and so forth would be enough in Iraq and the soldiers would have nothing to do but accept flowers and cheers from grateful Iraqis. It's the pro war crowd who attempted to dehumanize and oversold the consequences America's technological advantage. The anti-war crowd were pointing out the human cost which will be there no matter how smart your weapons are.
Yes, in order to stop dehumanizing war we should stop giving a shit about humans dying for little reason. Absolutely brilliant.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
That 'groundbreaking breathalyzer' is a SRI gas chromatograph connected to a hose that you blow into. Why didn't I think of that?!
Surgical robotics was initially conceived by DARPA as remote battlefront or space surgical robots and this technology is now widely available in the DaVinci surgical robots. I had had the fortune to have used these in the OR and to have spoken to the people at DARPA about the TraumaPod. Here is a link to my post on the traumapod that includes 3 videos from DARPA. These show their videogame-like concept animation and 2 work in progress videos of the systems. http://docinthemachine.com/2007/08/08/traumapod/
Now that that R&D has been sunk in these new devices, Asia can step in and clone everything for pennies preventing a dime of profit in the United States.
We will see Chinese-made disease breath analyzers in drug stores by Fall.
-- Posted from my parent's basement