Welcome to Robohub, Toshio Fukuda. Can you tell us about your research?

In my lab at Nagoya University we do many different kinds of research: micro/nano robotic systems, medical robotics, and particularly medical simulators. We have many people working on medical robots and surgery robots right now. We are working on an intravascular robotic surgical system that could be used for brain surgery, for example, but one of our important areas is simulation-based medicine.

Let me explain simulation-based medicine … Before a medical doctor goes into surgery, he has to plan the surgery, and he used to have to do this in his own mind. But now he can use our simulator. For example, if you could practice an exam before taking it for real, you would be more likely to get a good score. Likewise, a medical doctor can use our simulator to rehearse his surgical plan so that when it is time for surgery, he can carry it out with confidence. This is especially important for intravascular surgery, where you have a team of doctors doing the surgery together.

Our simulator is not just for general purpose: we can create patient-specific models. We developed a system called EVE – it is short for EndoVascular Evaluator. It is for training, evaluation and simulation of endovascular surgery. We start by taking a CT scan of the patient and then we make physical model of the patient’s vascular system out of silicon using a 3D printing system. A fluid control unit is then used to simulate the patient’s circulation. Doctors can test their surgical plans on this simulator – it gives them the sensation of a real endovascular surgery.

I think this is the only such simulator available in the world so far. Of course there are virtual-reality-based simulators, and these can be good enough for a beginner, but there is a big difference between a virtual-reality-based simulator and a real physical simulator that can be used by a professional. It makes a big difference if a group of medical doctors can get together and make a plan in advance on how to carry out the surgery using a surgical model where they can see it and practice together on it … In a real situation, if you make a mistake, you have to stop what you are doing and sometimes you cannot carry out the surgery. This way a team of surgeons can make a careful plan in advance.

We have done this since 1998, and we have a built business from it since 2005… we have a company now called FAIN-Biomedical and are selling to the US, Italy, South Africa and also China, Korea and other places.

Can this system be used for training, too?

Of course you can use the simulator to train, but the big advantage is rehearsing just before surgery.

You have done micro-robotics for a long time. Can you tell us about that?

For intravascular surgery, you use a catheter; catheters are small wires about 1mm in diameter that can fit inside a patient’s brain veins. Also we are now expanding to the liver and to the heart, to do bypass surgery …

Your heart has 15 main blood vessels. These are very small and if one of them gets choked up, then you have a strain and the heart does not work properly. The doctor usually carries out bypass surgery, bypassing the choked up place to unblock the problem. That’s the conventional way. But with bypass surgery you have to open up the patient’s chest and then after that you have to close it up again and it takes a couple of weeks to recover from it. However in theory it’s just a catheter surgery that takes one or two hours and after that the patient can walk away from the hospital the same day or the next day. That’s what we call minimally invasive surgery or MIS and it’s becoming very popular because it doesn’t give much burden to the patient. Even after catheter surgeries in the brain or the heart the patient can walk away from the hospital the same day or next day.

The problem is that the doctor must have good skills to navigate the catheter, for example in brain surgery, from the thigh up to the brain where he uses a coil to remove the blockage. For this you need to be skilled, and if you make a mistake, there is no way to fix it.

I have been working with micro-robots for many, many years now. When I moved to Nagoya 25 years ago, a medical doctor came to me and looked at my micro-robots. At that time I had a small 7mm diameter micro-robot going inside of a tube, a kind of low-impact robot. This doctor looked at my robot and asked me if I could build a similar robot to be used for medical treatments in the blood vessels. But it’s not easy to make a 1mm- or 2mm-diameter robot that works inside a catheter. The head of the catheter can be shaped in such a way that it can make right or left turns, the same as steering functions. But there aren’t any commercial products yet … for more than 20 years people have been working on making a functional robotic catheter, but nothing has been commercialized yet. So companies like Johnson & Johnson or Boston Scientific, they don’t sell it yet.

Why is that? What’s the obstacle?

Because of reliability. Also, one catheter costs $2000 and is for only one-time use. In surgery, up to four or five catheters might be used and that brings the cost already to $10,000. But more important is the patient safety: patients are exposed to x-ray during the procedure to guide the catheter and many catheters means the patient will be exposed to the x-ray longer.

Is there a natural connection between micro-robotics and medicine?

Yes, of course … because micro-robots are small and the human blood vessels are also small. If you make robots too big, there are many procedures you cannot do. Think of it in terms of an endoscope: if an endoscope is big it can cause pain. But endoscopes are getting smaller and smaller, and some you can even swallow. As robots get smaller, that’s a good thing from a medical perspective, because they can therefore go more deeply into the human body … even the eyes for corneal surgery.

Think even of the Da Vinci … why is it good? Because the human finger is so big … maybe 10mm in diameter, but the Da Vinci device is 3-5mm in diameter and can get inside the body to reach much smaller places than the human hand with less burden to patients.

Does the application of medicine push the field of robotics to be more interdisciplinary?

Yes, medical robotics is a very interdisciplinary area. For example Pierre Dupont conducts research at Boston University and is also now working at the Children’s Hospital. He is not a medical doctor; he is a robotics scientist. Many people in my field work the same way … engineers going into the medical field and making micro-robotics tools to help people and save their lives. If you visit universities engaged in robotics, you will find at least one person working on medical robots. More than 20 years ago, my friend demonstrated using an industrial robot for biopsy or cutting of bone – specifically the hipbone. Many people, especially the elderly, have hipbone joint problems that could be helped with an artificial joint. And sometimes robots can do a better job than the doctors of cutting the bone very precisely … though of course the doctor has to have good knowledge of the subject and operation, and the robot, as I have said, is just a tool.

Medical robotics is a very competitive field. Germany, France, Japan, US … everywhere.

Do you also see people moving from the other direction, from medicine into robotics?

Yes, there are not so many, but there are some. I have met some medical doctors who are very enthusiastic to use robotic technologies for surgeries.

Professor Yamato, who gave one of the plenary lectures at IROS this year, would be a good example?

Yes, he is a good friend, and a medical doctor who is self-taught in robotics …  he understands engineering. Other people are also looking mechanical robotic systems for surgery … maybe they are doing complicated surgeries and want to use more advanced technology, so they are making advances.

Before we finish, I was hoping you could tell us briefly about your recent trip to the Philippines after the typhoon … You were there on behalf of IEEE?

I’m a director of IEEE’s Region 10 – this is the Asia Pacific Region, including Japan, China, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia and other countries. After the typhoon I flew to Manila to meet with the local Region 10 officer and the chairman of the Philippines section of IEEE. The typhoon destroyed all the houses and infrastructure in the affected area; it was completely destructive. So we are working together on humanitarian technology program. We don’t give water or food … we give technology-based support. Like Internet recovery, energy and such things.

We have a lot of knowledge in this area from other disasters like the earthquake that befell a big province in Pakistan several years ago. Using experiences like this one in Pakistan or the tsunami in Indonesia, we are now making a list of priorities of what we should do to assist them. In most cases what we need first is to restore communication, Internet … after the typhoon in the Philippines there was no electricity and we therefore needed solar panels to keep the PCs working.

Is disaster response an especially important area for robotics in your region?

Yes, of course. There are disaster robot teams in Japan and also in IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, there is a technical committee, and we also have a humanitarian technology conference in Region 10. But in the Philippines case, disaster robot systems have played a very minor role so far. Priority is gathering information and restoring communication. In the first stage after a disaster, this is very, very important. But we are looking at later stages when we can bring some robots for taking care of people.

When will that happen?

We will be there in a couple of months … we have to hurry up. People need order to live. For security we want to bring robots to do monitoring, and to take care of the people from a psychological aspect, too. Many people have no houses to live in … it doesn’t feel good. For example we can bring PARO. PARO was made by Dr. Takanori Shidata, who was my graduate student in my lab at Nagoya … we want to bring this kind of robot to the Philippines. The PARO was also used here in Japan after Fukushima to help people with psychological aspects of recovery.

There are various stages where robotics can help after a disaster. We are making our priorities now.

Thank you Toshio for your time!

You are welcome.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Minimally-invasive eye surgery on the horizon as magnetically-guided microbots move toward clinical trials
• Crowdsourcing new strategies for cancer treatment: Towards swarming nanobots
• Medical robotic systems market to reach $13.6 billion by 2018

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Robohub team members just returned from an exciting trip to Tokyo, where we attended the 2013 IROS conference and the concurrent iREX robot expo. With so many excellent projects, so many insightful lectures, and so many innovative robots — not to mention the many consecutive tracks! — it was hard for any one person to take it all in.

This month we asked our Robotics by Invitation experts to tell us about what stood out for them at this year’s event. Here’s what they have to say …

Andra Keay on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

For me, the highlight of IROS was the Uncanny Valley special session, although the sheer size of the IROS conference and the parallel iRex industrial and service robot expo also gave much food for thought. In particular, the new coworking robots from Kaweda and ABB look very interesting, but it’s clear that it still takes a long time for research to transition into robust applied robotics …

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Lynne Parker on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

I found the plenary speeches at IROS to be especially interesting.  Marc Raibert gave an entertaining talk on the robots being developed at Boston Dynamics. It’s encouraging to see that robots are becoming more and more robust, even for very challenging domains. Marc emphasized his company philosophy of pushing robots until they break, and then learning from those breakdowns to improve robot performance and reliability. Learning from failure is often overlooked in robotics, but is critically important for achieving usable systems.It’s also a good life lesson!

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Frank Tobe on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

Two images remain in my mind from IROS 2013 last week in Tokyo. The respect for Professor Emeritus Mori and his charting of the uncanny valley in relation to robotics, and the need for a Watson-type synthesis of all the robotics-related scientific papers produced every year. Let me explain …

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Have your own IROS highlights you’d like to share? Leave a comment below!

Masayuki Yamato gave an inspiring talk on transplantable cell sheets, and how they can help speed the recovery from many different diseases and surgeries. He showed, complete with surgery videos (not for the faint of heart!), how his cell sheet therapy technology can address many medical problems in the eye, heart, esophagus, etc.  While robotics isn’t a main part of the research, it is clear that robotics is an important tool for enabling these clinical applications that can change people’s lives.

In the third plenary, Tim Lüth challenged the audience to not automate for the sake of automation, but to show how automation can improve the outcome in people’s lives. He showed a variety of successful devices that his team has developed for medical applications, and made a compelling argument that new technologies can be more readily accepted if they are quickly designed and close in nature to the non-automated medical approaches. He argued that simpler robots that are custom designed and manufactured for a specific patient and/or procedure might revolutionize medicine in the future.

One last highlight to mention from IROS is the iREX robot exhibition. The sheer number of industrial and automation robots on display was so impressive. The robots were fast, precise, and made excellent use of advanced vision technologies. And that massive FANUC arm with a 1300+ kg payload capacity was a sight to behold! It puts a whole new twist on the issue of robot safety!

Read more answers →

Let me explain.

Almost all of the presentations at IROS were abstract and technical except for the discussion about Prof. Mori’s Uncanny Valley theory. First of all, he was there and described how he came to observe the uncanny valley under different situations and circumstances. Secondly, all of the presenters and audience were respectful of Prof. Mori’s work, his theory, and him as a person. Third, and most interesting to me, each of the other speakers in this special lecture session described how the uncanny valley theory was relevant in different settings and disciplines. In art, philosophy, psychology — in the works of David Hanson and Hiroshi Ishiguro (both of whom were there) — as well as in medicine, prosthetics and in robotics in general. To me it was a reminder that robotics crosses sciences and connects with humans in many different forms, and this tribute presentation at IROS brought the personal relationships and the breadth of their reach to the forefront, and away from the abstract, theoretical and mechanical side of IROS.

In this video by IEEE/Spectrum, filmed outside the door of the room where the session was held, one can clearly see the multi-science and psychological/philosophical aspects of the theory:

Worse, 90% of scientists don’t even know whether their research is “new” or not.

Ever since I learned of the IBM Watson Jeopardy project my mind has been fascinated with possibilities for practical applications. IBM is on that trail as well and is using Watson to help with medical diagnoses and legal research and briefing. My idea is to get the NSF and IEEE (and other organizations) to commission a Watson project to synthesize robotics and AI-related science papers into a meaningful resource for all to use. At present, there are so many papers published that a researcher cannot possibly read them all. Consequently we don’t even know what we already know. But with Watson, we could know — and we could redirect research activities truly into the unknown without reinventing things over and over.

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The Uncanny Valley Revisited was a special tribute to Emeritus Professor Masahiro Mori, organized by co-chairs Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley and Minoru Asada, Osaka U. Masahiro Mori’s 1970 article, Bukimi no Tani Gensho, described a phenomenon of unease that is felt as animated beings become more similar to real beings.

Labelled the ‘uncanny valley‘ in reference to Freud’s concept of the Uncanny (Unheimlich), Mori’s work first appeared in translation in 1978 and proceeded to be broadly adopted in the art world and cultural/social sciences. Astonishingly, Mori believes that robotics only noticed his concept in the mid 2000s, when papers citing the uncanny valley were presented at HRI conferences. Elizabeth Jocum from Aarlsberg U was one of several to speakers to point to the early and deep impact of Mori’s idea in other disciplines, including the arts.

It’s apt that the art world was first to appreciate the Uncanny Valley hypothesis, as Freud himself said that the uncanny is the only thing more strongly felt in art than in life. It’s also a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon, as other speakers attested. Marek Michalowski discussed the impact that animators have had on the field of human robot interaction. After all, animation has been a strong field for over 100 years and is primarily concerned with creating a compelling imitation of life. In the process, animators utilize much more than just the static superficial appearance of a character. Sound, perspective, staging, background, color and timing all enhance or destroy the illusion of life.

Freud’s original concept of the uncanny is also more closely aligned to general anthropomorphism, where the impact is less on the closeness of appearance to human and more on the human ability to ascribe emotion, agency and symbolism to logical, mechanical events or objects.

Mori intended for his theory to be a simple warning for robot designers to consider the possible affect of their constructions, and he calls for robots to be made less life-like or human-like, as he wishes for technology to have positive and not negative contributions to the world.

Robots are already out there in the world, and I think we are frequently unprepared for the range of anthropomorphism that even unlikely looking robots can attract. This is well described in the work of Nass and Reeves in The Media Equation and leads to the ‘new ontological status’ hypothesis put forward by Kahn Jr, Reichardt, Kanda and Ishiguro. Generally speaking, I find that roboticists oversimplify the uncanny valley hypothesis. Mori himself describes it as a clue rather than a theory, so it was refreshing to hear so many great speakers give it much needed dynamism and depth.

Read more answers →

If the latest funny videos of robots falling over is all you hear about IROS2013, it’s understandable. This is the 26th year of IROS, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, and it’s a big conference. So big that it’s actually hard to know how to make sense of it. This conference starts out academic but then it delves into history and branches out into the industry with forums and the iREX expo and into social impact, with workshops and the contiguous conference ARSO, or Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impact.

Held at Tokyo Big Sight over 5 days, Nov 3 to 6, IROS has 170+ sessions presenting almost 1000 papers. There are about 2750 speakers listed, and, as many papers have 3-6 authors, the work of 4-5000 people is on show here, not counting the efforts of the organizers and exhibitors! That makes a lot of potential movement in the field of robotics, particularly when you consider that ICRA is a similarly large conference and the number of other robotics conferences is growing.

But with the increasing number of conferences, perhaps they are just ‘degree mills’, events necessary for the production of PhDs, rather than for propelling the robotics industry forward. However, for those in academia present at IROS, the organizers are proud to point out that the 904 papers accepted this year were of very high standard. The percentage of accepted papers is decreasing (43%), as the number of papers submitted each year increases (2094).

Some of the feature events at IROS2013 include a tribute to Masahiro Mori and a forum on innovation and industry. The Uncanny Valley Revisited: A Tribute to Masahiro Mori is a special session organized by Ken Goldberg and Minoru Asara.

Emeritus Professor Mori will address an audience of international researchers in Robotics to comment on the thinking behind his article and how it has evolved over the past 40 years, followed by responses from a panel of roboticists and media theorists.

Professor Mori’s influential 1970 article, Bukimi no Tani Gensho, describes a phenomenon where the appeal of animated beings undergoes a steep non-linearity as they become increasingly similar to humans. Subsequently labeled the “Uncanny Valley” as a reference to Sigmund Freud’s 1916 essay on the Uncanny, the Uncanny Valley continues to have widespread influence in the fields of robotics, design, gaming, computer animation, art, and plastic surgery.

The IROS plenary sessions are also much easier to describe than the technical sessions. Plenary speakers are; Marc Raibert, Boston Dynamics; Prof. Masayuki Yamato, Tokyo Women’s Medical University; and Prof. Tim C. Lüth, Technische Universität München;

While Marc Raibert’s plenary had plenty of funny video footage of robots falling over, he also made clear his motivations in tackling the challenge of dynamic movement. Raibert is not at all inspired to create human or animal like robots from the perspective of how we feel about them. For Raibert, the challenge lies in creating any sort of robot that can move just a fraction as well as an animal can. He points out that even very young humans and animals are able to move and balance far better than robots, although Boston Dynamics are starting to achieve a great deal of stability in their bipeds and quadrupeds.

Founded by Raibert in 1992, Boston Dynamics develops some of the world’s most advanced robots, such as BigDog, AlphaDog, Petman, Atlas and Cheetah. The company specializes in dynamic robots that move with the agility and athleticism normally found only in people and animals. The Atlas robots are the humanoid standards used in the DRC or Darpa Robotics Challenge, to push forward the development of disaster response robots.

And finally, expect more robot pictures on Thursday when the robot expo iREX opens in conjunction with the IROS and ARSO conferences. This year is the 20th anniversary of the biannual event. The last expo in 2011 showcased Japan’s renowned robotics technology, plus 43 companies from overseas with 98 booths. This year, iREX has added a service robotics section, so alongside all the research labs and major companies like Kuka, Fanuc, Schunck, Toyota, Mitsubishi etc., you’ll see companies like Clearpath, Coppelia, Cyberbotics, DJI Innovations, Engineered Arts, Force Dimension, and Shadow Robot.

Check back to this post during the workshop for the latest live stream. Do you have questions for the panel? Use hashtag #irosSciCom or post in the discussion below.

Program

Science communication in robotics
9am-10am
Online tools to stay informed and expand your reach (Sabine Hauert, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Robots for people who know nothing about robots (Evan Ackerman, IEEE Spectrum)

How to pitch your project to investors (Andra Keay, Robot LaunchPad & Silicon Valley Robotics)

Robots in the public discourse
10am-10:30am
A swarm on every desktop: Lessons on crowdsourcing swarm manipulation
Aaron Becker and Chris Ertel, Rice University

Public attitudes towards robots and outreach to the public through the European Union-funded programme on Cognitive Systems and Robotics
Cécile Huet, European Commission

10:30am – 11am
Break

11am-11:30am
Overview of the #robotsandyou conversation

Communicating the history of robotics through the voices of roboticists: the oral history of robotics project
Peter Asaro, School of Media Studies, The New School
Selma Sabanovic, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington
Staša Milojevic, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington
Sepand Ansari, School of Media Studies, The New School

Driving the discussion around robotics
11:30am-12:30am
Panelists:
Peter Asaro, The New School
Ryan Calo*, University of Washington
Travis Deyle*, Hizook
Dario Floreano, EPFL
Cécile Huet, European Commission
Chris Mailey, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
AJung Moon*, University of British Columbia & Roboethics Info Database
Bruno Siciliano*, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Alan Winfield*, University of the West of England

* online participants

Organizers:
Sabine Hauert, MIT, USA
Bruno Siciliano, UNINA, Italy
Markus Waibel, ETH Zurich, Switzerland