No doubt America cares about its troops who are in various remote areas of world. I am talking about American troops in Iraq and other countries in the world. NASA has successfully made a portable Robot that can perform surgery. This robotic surgeon is displayed in the BioRobotics Laboratory at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering building in Seattle this week. This robotic surgeon is not able to do operations itself. It gets instructions through Internet by human surgeon many miles away. U.S. Defense Department has given financial support to build it. This is great achievement in medical history. It can perform complicated surgery on patients in remote areas of the developing world and can treat sick astronauts in space. Professor Blake Hannaford, co-director of the UW BioRobotics Lab defines the difference between the robot surgeon demonstrated at the University of Washington and others that are being used today in American hospitals involve portability and communications.
The positive point of this Robot is that it doesn’t need robotic engineers to reconstruct it.
It can be transported and reconstructed by non-engineers at remote sites. The Robots that are currently performing surgery in various hospitals in US are heavy and non-portable. These can’t be easily broken down and reconstructed. Current medical robots also were not designed to be controlled from miles away.
The robot will give its experimental test in an underwater environment designed by NASA to simulate zero gravity. The mobile surgical robot is called as Raven. In the Aquarius Undersea Laboratory off the coast of Florida, robotic arms of Raven, holding surgical instruments will be operated by doctors in Seattle sitting in front of a computer screen and holding onto moveable metal arms. In this experiment, a rubber tube is used as a simulated blood vessel. The digital instructions given by human surgeons will travel over a commercial Internet connection from Seattle to Key Largo, Fla., and then through a wireless connection to a buoy, which is connected by cable to the submarine-like research pod about 60 feet underwater. Two NASA astronauts will be their with the robot.
Mitchell Lum, a research assistant and electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate, said,
An expected time delay of up to a second between the surgeon’s digital instructions and movement of the robot’s arms should be the most challenging part of the experiment. We think they will take longer to complete the tasks but we don’t think it’s undoable.
The co-director of the BioRobotics Lab, Associate Professor Jacob Rosen, said ,
they needed the cooperation of doctors and every kind of engineer and computer scientist to make the robot work and we’ve all had to learn how to go into the different realms
