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Medicine Robotics

Researchers Scrambling To Build Ebola-Fighting Robots 87

Posted by timothy from the at-one-remove dept.
Lucas123 (935744) writes U.S. robotics researchers from around the country are collaborating on a project to build autonomous vehicles that could deliver food and medicine, and telepresence robots that could safely decontaminate equipment and help bury the victims of Ebola. Organizers of Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers are planning a workshop on Nov. 7. that will be co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Texas A&M, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. "We are trying to identify the technologies that can help human workers minimize their contact with Ebola. Whatever technology we deploy, there will be a human in the loop. We are not trying to replace human caregivers. We are trying to minimize contact," said Taskin Padir, an assistant professor of robotics engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
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Researchers Scrambling To Build Ebola-Fighting Robots

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  • Economics plays a role here (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I was crunching the numbers yesterday to determine if it would be cheaper for the US military to just rent Carnival cruise ships* for 1 month than it would be for them to build hospital beds(it was). This was ignoring the force multiplier of immediate delivery.

    *($50/person a day average)

    They can't even afford enough body bags. Whatever people come up with has to be more than just "better". It has to be cheaper than the current solutions over the relevant time frames.

    • Why do we have no good Ebola treatments already right now? Regulations. The FDA ordered Zmapp to stop testing back in July and ordered TMK-Ebola research suspended in January.

      How much sense does it make to send a bunch of troops to Africa to build isolation camps (yeah, yeah,call them hospitals) for them? Zero. I mean, to your point, it's not like we couldn't save money by just paying local contractors to put up some buildings. Why do we want the military in the African construction business? Is it because

      • Google "funding for Ebola vs. funding for DOD".

        • Pretty sure if you have the money to spend $39 million on [freebeacon.com] researching why obese girls have a tough time getting dates, developing origami condoms, etc... the problem with not starting a $9 million research effort earlier isn't related to overall funding levels so much as to incompetent administration and politics driven priorities.

          • The NIH is not the CDC. By the way, the DoD will spend $495.6 Billion (with a B) next year. $39 million will not even pay for a fix for the cluster fuck that is the F-35.

            • The NIH is not the CDC. By the way, the DoD will spend $495.6 Billion (with a B) next year. $39 million will not even pay for a fix for the cluster fuck that is the F-35.

              Oh yeah, about that... turns out that they found another glitch with the F-35. It's a funny story. So you probably know about the software glitches, and the cracks in the airframe, and the issues with the tailhook being in the wrong place on the carrier version. Well, turns out that the F-35 has a feature that sprays Ebola-laden blood and fecal matter all over when you turn the engine on.

              Of course, it is easy to point fingers and say "hey, Lockheed Martin! Maybe you shouldn't include a feature where the pl

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by umghhh ( 965931 )
              But that is only because helmets for f-35 pilots cost 600k a peace and US ordered more than 65 of them.

            • Are you attempting to disagree with me, or agree with me? It's not very clear...

              What is your statement about the CDC in reference to? I don't see anyone here suggesting the CDC is the NIH. Was this meant sarcastically, like, "Well the NIH is no CDC", to imply that despite how screwed up the NIH is, at least they aren't as screwed up as the CDC has demonstrated itself to be recently?

              The NIH is the government agency responsible for funding an Ebola vaccine research project (which they've recently assigned a b

              • Your link was to the waste by the NIH. CDC is in charge of outbreaks like Ebola. NIH is responsible for researching whatever Congress grants if funding to do. Ebola was not in the budget.

                • You apparently didn't read the whole article:
                  "On Tuesday, Health and Human Services (HHS) had to outsource efforts at an Ebola vaccine to the Baltimore-based Profectus BioSciences Inc. The company will receive $8.6 million to research and test their vaccine, a fraction of NIH funding that went to the above projects."

                  NIH [wikipedia.org] is part of HHS. It is "the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research".

                  • That's super. My original post was google "funding for Ebola vs. funding for DOD". The entire HHS budget is about $4.8 billion vs. $486 billion for DoD. Just setting forth our priorities.
          • It would be cheaper to develop a vaccine for ebola then to develop quarantine robots to deal with the effects. The reason this hasn't happened is because we let private companies run our medical system (hospitals, drugs, vaccines) instead of having government do this vital task, and private companies care more about making money than saving lives.

            • You should have started at the top of the thread.

              The FDA ordered Zmapp to stop testing back in July and ordered TMK-Ebola research suspended in January.

              These were private companies trying to create treatments and vaccines who were literally stopped by the government.

              As the government was actively preventing Ebola treatments, before having them "do this vital task", perhaps we should look at their record on the issue?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by umghhh ( 965931 )
        If you leave these people to their own devices then not only they will start dying in big numbers but because their society will collapse and we will have refugees everywhere and this means the virus will be everywhere (consult a map of the region and think about how many troops you would need to quarantine that when you think that is a right solution). This is the reason we try to help. Now the way to help is another matter. I think sending people there to help treatment of patients is one thing but if the
  • would be an appropriate role, unless religion gets in the way.

  • Wouldn't a vaccine be a better use of research money?

    • It isn't an either/or situation.
      Vaccines take time to develop, produce, and administer.
      Bodies are piling up right now.
      These roboticists want to Do Something and this is what they know how to do.

    • Hmmm. If we developed an Ebola vaccine, it might be the world's greatest knows way of eliminating Luddites. We could even put a homeopathically small trace amount of mercury in it, just to make sure.

      • If we developed an Ebola vaccine, it might be the world's greatest knows way of eliminating Luddites.

        You can eliminate Luddites by making sure people losing their jobs to machines don't become desolate. That was, after all, Ludd's complaint. But of course any actual method of doing so would be eeevil socialism, so I guess it's easier to remain ideologically pure and pretend ludditism is about some inherent hate of progress.

        • It's true that the original Ned Ludd protests in 1811 were purely a labor movement by crofters who perceived their artisanal fabric-making business in danger from the Jacquard loom. No concept of what industrialization would mean in the long run existed at the time.

          It would be nice if we had a more historically accurate term for it, but the movement that we call Luddite today actually is a visceral hatred of innovation itself. It's the idea that applications of science are by default dangerous and 'corporat

  • I have some already (Score:3)

    by spiritplumber ( 1944222 ) on Saturday October 18, 2014 @11:58AM (#48176073) Homepage
    I have some of these robots already, they were developed in partnership with Inertia Labs of Battlebots fame. Please tell me how I can contact these folks so that I can hand the technology and protoypes over! I'm serious! http://www.robots-everywhere.c... [robots-everywhere.com]

  • We need more Firestones in the World (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lisias ( 447563 ) on Saturday October 18, 2014 @12:03PM (#48176107) Homepage Journal

    See for yourself [usatoday.com].

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by umghhh ( 965931 )
      If this is actually true it just shows that WHO is no good with their plans - more money and resources needed to be diverted to local communities to help themselves. There are not enough of helpers from outside to help now anyway so this is probably better and even if it does not work for everybody it may actually work well enough to convince the idiots claiming that there is novirus or that it is spread on purpose by burial teams etc. or just wait until they die and make for a better world.

      ON a second tho

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday October 18, 2014 @12:04PM (#48176113)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • This is controversial but it should be said. but the biggest problem, religion, cant be solved with technology because religious zealots dont operate logically.

      "Religion" isn't some generic thing, equivalent in all it's forms.

      The whole concept of a hospital exists due to Christianity.

      We have the same issues in america, albeit to a lesser extent with anti-vaccination conspiricists and seventh day adventists that refuse to immunize their children or set foot in a hospital.

      Ah, that well known nun Jenny McCarthy.

    • This is controversial but it should be said. but the biggest problem, religion, cant be solved with technology because religious zealots dont operate logically.

      History doesn't bear this out. During the black plague in Europe, the Jews fared much better than others because of a ritual of cleanliness. Islam also has numerous cleansing/washing rituals. At best, lumping all religions together is ignorant.

  • Vaccine + survivors (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Saturday October 18, 2014 @12:06PM (#48176127)
    Ebola is a virus, if a person survives the disease they are apparently immune to at least the same strain. Training those people to provide care seems like a more viable option.

  • Modern Monty Python (Score:3)

    by DaveM753 ( 844913 ) on Saturday October 18, 2014 @12:13PM (#48176151)
    I can just see groups of robots slowly rolling down the cobblestone streets announcing, in typical monotoned robot-voice fashion, "BRING...OUT...YOUR...DEAD..."

    Someday, children will sing songs about it. In the meantime, please get off my plane. TY.

  • about jaegers and kaiju

  • Well, this poor guy [youtube.com] would be out of a job now, wouldn't he?

  • They should stick to making modems (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    US Robotics? I can see it now.

    Robot rolls up to a patient and says:
    BEEEEBEEEEE buhhhhbhhhhhh weeeeeow weeeeow wah KSHHHHHHHHHHH

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • U.S. robotics researchers from around the country are collaborating on a project to build autonomous vehicles that could deliver food and medicine, and telepresence robots that could safely decontaminate equipment and help bury the victims of Ebola

    I'm glad to hear the folks at U.S. Robotics have found something useful to work on, given how the dial-up modem business has tanked.

  • US Robotics, do they still exist?

  • Great, until the robots get the e-b0la computer virus.

  • A cute idea, that will take longer to create that the problem will exist. But lets look at some the requirements. With a 3 hour charge on some battery pack; change every 2 hours. The humanoid torque engineering is fairly stright forward. Self balancing. Record all movements, audio, and visual; straight forward. Be repairable, or parts replaceable. Use them initially as a type of drone.

  • UAV robot to capture the fruit bat that's suppose to be the original of Ebola.
    If people don't have food, they go back to hunt for fruit bat. The cycle never end.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • "We are trying to identify the technologies that can help human workers minimize their contact with Ebola." said Taskin Padir, an assistant professor of robotics engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

    That technology exists: protective clothing, properly used, and sanitary waste disposal. If you can't get that, you won't be able to get robots. If you have it but cannot organize its correct use, there is an effective solution, but it doesn't involve robotics.

    • I should've read TFA for clarity, somehow made this about nanotechnology in my head.
      Main concept of my point still stands though; hardly anybody stepped in when Ebola remained in Africa.

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