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Undergrad-built Robots Play "Operation"
jnakane writes "UBC Engineering Physics students pit prototype operation robots against each other for prizes and bragging rights in the 7th Annual Robot Competition. Offering solutions to handle delicate body parts on a 6-foot long version of the playing surface resembling the board game "Operation" (including the "shock" buzzer), the second-year students designed and built autonomous surgical robots to remove body organs reliably and quickly (well, most of the time). You can also see video footage."
Everyone knows the game is only fun when played as "strip Operation" with a group of drunk college students. Who the hell wants to see robots naked?
(...he says, kicking a nearby Sorayama book under the couch.)
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A bunch of geeks build a robot to "play doctor" instead of doing it themselves. When will it end?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
I teach in an engineering school and I must say that 6 weeks to design, build and program that kind of robot is really short. They must be very, very good because this is a great challenge.
:-)
Congratulations to all of you guys !
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I don't mean to belittle the efforts that went into building these, but I was a bit disappointed to see that it was not the real "Operation" game but some big table with big holes in it. The robots use some type of magnet to pick up metallic objects instead of tweezers to pick up small plastic things. The holes are also big squares instead of the squiggly holes that make the original interesting.
Of course, making an autonomous robot that plays the real thing would be an order of magnitude harder. Hopefully some of the contestants had so much fun they'll go on to try to create that sometime in the future.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
I happened to be visiting UBC when this was going on, and my roommate in the residence had a robot in the competition... so I went to go check it out.
Of course robotics engineering is not as difficult as it used to be, with better COTS sensors, affordable fab tools, an expanding open source robotics community, and of course Moore's Law...
Regardless, it was really incredible to see what _second_ year students are capable of these days. Also, lots of credit should go to the ambitious profs who have been organizing the course for the past few years.
These robots will be really interesting when they can simulate in themselves the feeling of recoiling in shock and horror when a long run of successful extractions suddenly ends when they touch their instrument to patient, and that damn buzzer goes off. And it hands the tweezers to its bratty little sister for her easy win.
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Need to go more in the Battlebots direction:
The Vivisector
The Amputator
Dr. Lecter
Medica Malpractica
The Ripper
Which would all be really great names for rock bands.
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