Future of robotics in the United States.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has through a grant from NSF approved a study to formulate a targeted R&D roadmap for robotics. The process has been managed by a broad group of researcher across major US institutions. The Robotics Roadmap has finally been presented to Congress! On May 21, 2009 four presentations were given before a Congressional Caucus about the future of robotics in the United States. CCC Robotics Roadmap Final Report

Healthcare Robotics at Georgia Tech

Researchers at the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech have developed an assistive robot , called El-E, that is explicitly designed to take advantage of this common structure in order to retrieve unmodeled, everyday objects for people with motor impairments. El-E is equipped with a laser pointer interface that detects when a user illuminates a location with an off-the-shelf green laser pointer and estimates its 3D position. This enables a user to unambiguously communicate a 3D location to the robot using a point-and-click style of interaction, which provides a direct way to tell the robot which object to manipulate or where to go.

El-E the Robot from Cressel Anderson on Vimeo.

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Program

CPS refers to the integration of computational and physical resources to realize engineered systems that far exceed today's systems in autonomy, functionality, efficiency, usability, safety, and reliability. Examples of such systems and applications include smart homes, intelligent transport and energy systems, nano-scale precision manufacturing systems. An important component of CPS are robots that can interact intelligently with its environment based on embedded computation and communication, real-time control, and perception of the world around them. Examples of CPS robotic systems are robots for assisted living in smart-homes, telemedicine, telesurgery, robot swarms for exploration and emergency response.

In the U.S. NSF's Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Engineering (ENG) are funding the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) program with $5M because of its scientific and technological importance as well as its potential impact on grand challenges in a number of sectors critical to U.S. security and competitiveness, including aerospace, automotive, chemical production, civil infrastructure, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, materials and transportation.

Dagstuhl seminar 2009 - Cognition, Control and Learning for Robot Manipulation in Human Environments

The seminar will be held from 16.08.2009 to 21.08.2009 at castle Dagstuhl, Germany. The goal of the seminar is to make significant progress towards closing the gap between human and robot manipulation in uncertain environments inhabited by humans. The event is sponsored by the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft.

The German Workshop on Robotics 2009

The German Workshop on Robotics 2009 in Braunschweig June 9-10 will bring together roboticists from academia and industry working on algorithmic or mathematical foundations of robotics, design and analysis of robotic systems as well as robotic applications. Contributions from researchers in all German-speaking countries as well as from the international robotics community are solicited in all areas of robotics.
The conference will be single-track to allow all attendees to experience and to discuss superior research results in all areas of robotics. To ensure high quality, a highly selective review process will lead to the final program.

Danish Robotics Consortium

The Danish Technological Institute, Centre for Robot Technology has in cooperation with a line of companies, just recently, forwarded an application to the board of Research and Innovation, to fund a new ground-breaking innovation consortium: Exoskeleton.
Exoskeletons, also known as power suits are an example of Human Robot Integration (HRI), which refers to humans and robots being closely connected. A form of integration, which can help humans with rehabilitation or increase the life quality of physically impaired.
Besides the Danish Technological Institute and Centre for Robot technology, the Consortium behind Exoskeleton consists of Ergolet, Giben, Scandinavia, Invacare, Guldmann, Wolturnus, Vitaris and Robocluster.

Robots for telemedicine and fire fighting

The sixth annual RoboBusiness Conference and Expo in Boston focused on personal, service and mobile robotics. CCS Robotics has also developed a mobile robot called RoboRounder™ that can be facilitate for tele-medicine. A doctor in Sweden can visit patients in USA without the need for on-site assistance. Once connected over the internet or via 3G wireless link, simply tell the RoboRounder to go to a specific room. Manual driving and camera control can be used once the robot has arrived at the patient's bedside. Fully integrated medical records, charts, and tele-stration are visible to the patient and family members via the robot's large 17" LCD. Telemetry and medical instrument integration allows instant access to the patient's status as well as 2-Way video conferencing. The ultimate accessory to the Apple iPhone, RoboRounder™ can also be used for remote sales, engineering, supervision, and teaching.

Segway introduced a new robot based on the RMP 400 robotic platform and can move at 18 miles an hour while carrying up to 400 pounds. It is also armed with a water cannon than can fire 10 gallons of liquid per second. Segway envisions the robot being used for mostly fighting forest fires, but also a small amount to be used for crowd control. Segway has stated an experimentell project called P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) to develop next generation personell tranportation system.

German AMaRob Project

At the Institute of Automation (IAT) University of Bremen researchers develop the next generation rehabilitation robotic systems based on the experiences from former robotarm platforms. The AMaRob project research goal is to support elderly and handicapped people in ADL (activities of daily living) tasks for at least 1.5 contiguous hours.

The AMaRob project is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Science, BMBF, in the scope of an innovation program in the field of service robotics. The project executing organization for the BMBF is the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt / German Aerospace Center).