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Robotics Biotech Technology

DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer 73

Posted by samzenpus from the cyborg-monkey-still-a-dream dept.
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."
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DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer More

DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer

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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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RuBLed ( 995686 )
      It is still good to know that it does have a human doctor/operator and most of the autonomous functions deals with fluid administration and surgical assistance, much like a surgeon in an operating room, just replace the nurses with this machine. This would be lifesaving for the soldiers.

      (I really hope there is no "kill" switch)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jdray ( 645332 )
        Right. Let's just hope the network doesn't drop the doc's session at a critical moment...
    • I think the screen would be more red

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "treated" a mannequin during a test, with no complications."
      WTF!$#@?>??? The mannequin came out with no penis for crying out loud!!

    • successfully "treated" a mannequin during a test, with no complications.



      It's good to know that the mannequin didn't bleed out or get staph infection or pnemonia or etc....

      No complications ... !! :-P
  • 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 t

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Paradigm_Complex ( 968558 )
      So far, robots are pretty dumb. While I agree in our modern capitalist world 'bots will continue to chip away at a large number of jobs, these jobs are usually the ones that don't require an education. Get an education and plenty of doors will open up that robots can't touch. If you don't like that don't blame tech, blame capitalism. Your argument about lessening the horrors of war was made by (Mr?) Gatling back in the 1860's. Don't know if you noticed, but the horrible bloodshed his invention allowed

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by johneee ( 626549 )
        "While I agree in our modern capitalist world 'bots will continue to chip away at a large number of jobs, these jobs are usually the ones that don't require an education. Get an education and plenty of doors will open up that robots can't touch. If you don't like that don't blame tech, blame capitalism."

        And, in fact, I do blame capitalism... The problem being that in our society we don't value in any way the necessary work that is done by people with little education or even intelligence, and our system bl

    • Re:Automation and the devaluation of humans (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Knutsi ( 959723 ) on Thursday August 09, 2007 @06:01AM (#20167385)

      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.

      And it's already going on. Cruise missiles take out unseen targets daily. Now how does an enemy respond to that? Can anyone say terrorism? Can anyone say anti-Americanism? If you see thousands of your people destroyed by an unseen, elitist enemy that you cannot direct your anger at due to their superiority, wouldn't it make sense to support someone going carrying a suitcase-nuke to downtown NYC as payback?

      I'm not saying it's right in any way, just that maybe terror can't be forced back by causing more reason for grievance?

      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.

      When you retire a generation of workers by robots (somehow a development I suspect is being delayed by something called "outsourcing to the developing world") there will of course be a gap in which a generation of workers need to reeducate. Now, most of those in question will be quite old (as they didn't see the change coming, and thought the job had a future), so obviously there will be problems like this.

      It doesn't mean it's not worth it. After some time, people won't educate to the job that are now replaced by robots. In the future, I suspect the only jobs out there will be engineering, sciences and art. That's not to bad, is it?

      (Personally I do however have a more bleak view of the future related to overpopulation, but that is off-topic)

      • We can always reinstitute slavery if nothing else helps [/sarcasm]
      • I would include doctors and lawyers.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Knutsi ( 959723 )
          Or maybe doctors will be more like engineers? (: Lawyers on the other hand will be wiped out as soon as nanotechnology sophisticated enough to make a plague specifically targeting certain professions arrives.
          • That'll take a while yet.
            There's more important things on the list for specifically-targeting-certain-professions department.
            Spammers, telemarketers, MAFIAA-endorsing studio executives, SCO executives and a few other breeds of bottom-feeding scum.

            We could, of course, take the practical DA approach and stage a fake planetwide disaster, put them on a spaceship and "evacuate" them first, claiming to follow in the next ships right after...

    • 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.
    • Blame it on the anti-war crowd. The majority of the opposition to the Iraq war seems to be based on the number of American soldiers killed. So what do you expect? Ofcourse the government is going to try and lower the exposure of soldiers to combat. The fewer men we have out there fighting, the fewer we lose, and the less things there is for the media (and the Democrats) to criticize. Makes perfect sense.

      Don't want killing machines replacing soldiers? Stop with the idiotic "bring our sons home" rhetori

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by aeksy ( 322566 )
        So let me get this straight: you are advocating that more Americans should be killed in combat than is necessary, AND you want the public to support that? You also seem to think that criticizing the unnecessary casualties is a purely a Democratic agenda. That's...well...pretty god damn deluded idea.

        Don't want killing machines replacing soldiers? Stop with the idiotic "bring our sons home" rhetoric.

        Yeah, parents who wish to bring their children home from an drawn-out, unwinnable war that was sold to the publ

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dm0527 ( 975468 )

        Stop with the idiotic "bring our sons home" rhetoric.

        Wow...okay, I happen to think that the invasion of Iraq was a crappy idea - we missed the target by a letter. That being said, I also believe that now that we're over there, we should stop dicking around and get the job done. I personally believe that pulling out of Iraq will accomplish only causing us to look weak to our enemies, innocent Iraq citizens will die and the terrorist movement will gain a homeland. Basically, I think pulling out of Iraq wo

        • Anyone with half a brain wants to "bring our sons home". How can you be that damn thick?
          I'm sure that anyone with half a brain wants exactly that. I'm also sure that anyone with a full brain wants to stay and finish the job. I'm not sure exactly what you think we're disagreeing about.
      • They objected to the war because it was unjustified and therefore the deaths on all sides would be a waste.

        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 a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bentcd ( 690786 )

      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.
      Let us all join together and march on these metal monsters, usurpers of our jobs, and throw our wooden clogs at them!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mi ( 197448 )

      But what we got instead was robots taking our jobs without a safety net for the displaced workers.

      What a dumb lamentation! There aren't enough workers. America's unemployment is very low and filling a position with a capable worker is rather difficult. Besides, there are jobs, at which humans are simply incredibly bad, whereas a machine is incredibly good. Comparing two texts, for example, or waking you up at the specified time...

      Here is an illustration from an earlier era. Rich people used to have staf

      • Here is an illustration from an earlier era. Rich people used to have staff, who would do all sorts of routine work for them -- now even the poorest can have fast and efficient transportation, clean tea-making implements, fast way to wash their clothes and beddings. You are lamenting the fate of all those poor maids, who lost their jobs to dishwashers and electric kettles. The right approach is to celebrate their having their dishes and tea done for them by machines and the freeing of sentient beings from

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mi ( 197448 )

          Great. Now what about the rest of the people, as in all the people who live in Africa and Asia? Not everyone lives in the west.

          He is saying, the machines — as we employ them — are bad, because they are being introduced without a safety net for the displaced workers. He can not be talking about the people "in Africa and Asia" because those (largely agrarian) societies never had the "workers" before.

          You misunderstood the parent. He's not saying machines are bad, he's saying the way the benefit o

  • More wasted R&D Billions (Score:3, Informative)

    by malsdavis ( 542216 ) on Thursday August 09, 2007 @06:22AM (#20167497)
    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!
    • It wasn't the fault of stealth not working. Current theories (at least from my rusty memory) for the reason the F-117 was shot down are as follows; it is likely that many (if not all) of them contributed:

      1: Leadership dictated that strike aircraft follow the same flight paths in/out of the target area, night after night.

      2: Enemy intelligence revealed some of the flight paths being used.

      3: Stealth aircraft are vulnerable to radar detection when their weapons bays are open. The aircraft may have been detect

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by toolie ( 22684 )

        Remember also that stealth worked very well back in 1991. Iraq had one of the most dense air defense networks in the world, especially around Baghdad, but not a single aircraft was lost.

        The reason no aircraft were lost is simple. The war started when Apaches (decidedly non-radar stealthy) took out the early warning radar sites to open up a corridor to Baghdad free of any anti-aircraft radar. The Apaches got close enough (within 8km of the radar sites) by staying NOE and below the radar. Its hard to see something when you have no eyes. All that footage of the sky over Baghdad being lit up by flak was because the forward deployed radar sites were engaged and the Iraqi's assumed that it

    • Of course, first generation stealth technology was very expensive and unperfect, exactly as any other technology.

      The F117 was slow, not very maneuvrable and had to stay near the ground and take benefit of the geography for the stealth to be effective, and therefore, it could be heard and its path was relatively predictable, so it was vulnerable to ambushes.
      Now compare that to the F22. Of course, it is expensive, but it's the ultimate hunting machine up there. Now, is that the best ROI when the oponents only
      • My point isn't about the maturity of the technology, it's about the short-sightedness of military expenditure on R&D.

        We spent hundreds of billions expensively trying to get Stealth technology working quickly based on a cold war mentality and now that it is working we have absolutely no use for it in the "war on terror". Now however, the urgent rush is to get autonomous vehicles working, but it's a sure bet that by the time they are working, the "war on terror" will be over and autonomous vehicles will b

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by trawg ( 308495 )

      I bet Lockhead Martin and the other defense contractors aren't complaining though, our tax dollars keep their industry a highly paid one!

      indeed; I have to wonder if the dollars was taken out of the equation (eg, make all military contractors non-profit government entities) exactly how keen people would be to keep up this whole war thing.

      Given government's past trends to be relatively easily swayed by vast sums of money, and the vast sums of money going to defense contractors, in my (admittedly extremely limited) view it seems like its a pretty nice circular arrangement they all have going there. The only people that lose are the kids that

    • Do you not understand the difference between robots and stealth? They are 2 completely different subjects...Stealth is used mainly for war, while yes these specific robots are being made to help in war they are also furthering the advancement of robot technology everywhere. You also have the big difference of vehicles versus something that go in a house or on the ground and make sure our soldiers themselves will be a lot safer. I almost married a soldier, and trust me anything that makes her life or any

  • Ugh. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • Teddy Bear Head (Score:3, Informative)

    by garlicbready ( 846542 ) on Thursday August 09, 2007 @06:45AM (#20167603)
    for the Trauma Pod I was looking at this bit

    Getting the patient off the battlefield and into a hospital is another matter. While the Pod is supposed to eventually meet certain size and weight restrictions, there are no plans yet to incorporate specific vehicles

    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/ 07/1631239 [slashdot.org]

    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...
    • Let me guess...

      1) Stupid politician strongly reduce medical program to give the money to counterterrorism.
      2) Intelligent counterterrorism executive know they have far enough money for what they have to do and look for something that kills far more americans that terrorism.
      3) Profit.
  • 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
  • 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...

  • ObTrek (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Thursday August 09, 2007 @09:08AM (#20168521) Homepage Journal
    "Please state the nature of the medical emergency."
    • The scary downside of this is that it does seem that the DARPA guys spend most of their time trying to create stuff that was on Star Trek. I'm sure at least one of them is working on a Genesis device. A little worrying...

      Mind you, the upside is that we do get to play with things from Star Trek. Let me know when they make a 7 of 9...

      • The scary downside of this is that it does seem that the DARPA guys spend most of their time trying to create stuff that was on Star Trek.
        It could be worse; at least they're Trekkies instead of Pokemon fans. Imagine if instead of this stuff, all they had to show for their research was a billiard ball you could suck your pets into.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Atheose ( 932144 )
      Thank you for the obligatory StarCraft quote! Gave me a good chuckle this morning.

      Whenever I would play some Brood War and the medic said that, at LAN parties I would respond "The nature of my medical emergency is lack of blowjob." Ahhh, I miss those days.
  • of /.-ers whining about the agency (DARPA) directly responsible for the invention of the Internet, using the Internet.
  • 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 [youtube.com]
  • 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 [docinthemachine.com]
  • 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.

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