Smart prosthetic hand combines both human and robot control

Zhuang et al. Shared human–robot proportional control of a dexterous myoelectric prosthesis. Nature Machine Intelligence, September 2019.

Holding an object in your hand might seem easy, but it’s actually a very complicated and challenging task; if, for instance, an object starts to slip, you typically have a couple of milliseconds to react. Scientists have been trying new approaches for improved control of robotic hands, particularly for use by amputees. A recent technology was able to combine individual finger control and automation for improved grasping and manipulation by successfully merging the fields of neuroengineering and robotics. This interdisciplinary approach was tested on three amputees and seven non-amputee subjects. The neuroengineers achieved the intended finger movement from muscular activity on the amputee’s stump, allowing for individual finger control of a prosthetic hand, which had never been done before. The robotics team enabled the robotic hand to take hold of objects and maintain contact with them for robust grasping. The amputee first performed a series of hand movements in order to train the algorithm through a machine learning paradigm. This taught the algorithm to decode user intention and translate it into finger movements of the prosthetic hand. Concurrently, sensors placed on the amputee’s stump detected muscular activity, which trained the algorithm to learn which hand movements corresponded to which patterns of muscular activity. Once the user’s intended finger movements were acquired, this information could then be used to control individual fingers on the prosthetic hand. When the user tried to grasp an object, the robotic automation initiated. The algorithm told the prosthetic hand to close its fingers when an object was in contact with sensors on the hand’s surface. This automatic grasping was designed to infer the shape of objects and grasp them based on tactile information alone, without any help of visual signals. The robotic hand has the ability to react within 400 milliseconds, and it is equipped with pressure sensors all along the fingers: it can react and stabilize the object before the brain can actually perceive that the object is slipping. While this promising technology can be used in in several neuro-prosthetic applications such as bionic hand prostheses and brain-to-machine interfaces, there are still many challenges remaining to implement this technology in a commercially available prosthetic hand for amputees. It is currently being tested and improved.

Cats securely bond with people, too

Vitale et al. Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans. Current Biology, September 2019.

Dogs have long been regarded as man’s best friend. They’re sociable, faithful, and obedient. Cats, on the other hand, are often described as more aloof, mysterious, and independent. But a new study suggests that cats actually bond with their owners in similar ways to how humans and dogs bond with companions. The most established way to study human attachment behavior is to observe an infant’s response to a reunion with their caregiver following a brief absence in a novel environment. When a caregiver returns, secure infants quickly return to relaxed exploration while insecure individuals engage in excessive clinging or avoidance behavior. These tests had been previously run with humans, primates, and dogs; researchers decided to run the same test with cats. 79 kittens and 38 adult cats and their caregivers were recruited. During the test, an adult cat or kitten spent two minutes in a novel room with their caregiver followed by two minutes alone. Then, they had a two-minute reunion. The cats’ responses to seeing their owners again were classified into attachment styles. The results show that cats bond in a way that’s surprisingly similar to infants. In humans, 65% of infants are securely attached to their caregiver and domestic cats and kittens mirrored this, as about 65% of them securely bonded to their people. After the first round of tests, the researchers enrolled half the kittens used in the study in a training and socialization course. The other half served as a control group. Researchers then found the same results, suggesting the training did not have an effect on kittens’ attachment behavior toward their owners. This indicates that once a cat forms a bond, it seems to remain stable over time. This social flexibility may have helped facilitate the success of the species in human homes. It is still not clear what the factors are that shape the caretaker relationship, but it’s likely a miraculous complex mix of genetics, personality, and experience.

An efficient and green way to convert heat into electricity

Zheng et al. Paramagnon drag in high thermoelectric figure of merit Li-doped MnTe. Science Advances, September 2019.

A recent discovery could help scientists to develop more efficient ways to generate electricity from heat that would have been otherwise wasted, such as heat coming from car exhaust, industrial processes, and interplanetary space probes. In principle, magnetic fields can be used to generate electricity. If we move a magnet through a coil or wire, the magnet pushes and pulls electrons that create an electrical current. Magnets themselves don’t have energy, but they can control energy currents through the created magnetic field. The main problem with magnets is that when a magnet is heated up, it loses most of its magnetic properties and becomes a so-called paramagnet. Until this discovery, scientists believed that paramagnets couldn’t be used for generating electricity. In the new study, researchers found a way of designing thermoelectric semiconductors that can convert heat to electricity. The tiny particles in paramagnets, so called paramagnons, ended up producing enough spin to push an electron, for only a billionth of a millionth of a second – apparently long enough to make paramagnets viable energy-harvesters. This breakthrough in the conventional understanding of magnetic properties could lead to more research into how magnets and energy interact to potentially facilitate electricity production from heat that is otherwise wasted and oftentimes harmful to the environment.

In recent years scientists have taken huge steps towards the bio-hybrid architecture developed for exploring an alternate approach to the control of autonomous robots (1). The plant-robot interactions through cyborg plants have been investigated in an effort to apply lessons from plants to robots, which provided another role for these organisms other than being a food source or decoration items. There are several joint experimental, numerical and robotic studies conducted in this newly developed area. One of the examples includes a flower robot made by Korean engineers which has the appearance of a common flower with petals, stem and leaves (2). The flower robot has sensing ability, moving mechanism, and home appliance function. It can recognize environmental conditions such as room temperature, pressure, voice and light intensity and can imitate the blooming of a flower, the bending of the stem and the stirring of the leaves in the wind. Other than these, the flower robot functions as a humidifier, a vision/voice recording system and an illumination device. For example, when flower robot receives light, it senses the intensity of the light and blooms. On the contrary, when it is dark, as the flower robot starts fading away and its illumination device turns on to flash the room.

Plantas nomadas, made by Mexican artist Gilberto Espaza, is another example of cyborg plants. It uses dirty water to live. It is a miniature eco-system consisting of plants and micro-organisms within a robotic shell. Each of the components symbiotically relies on the others: the plant provides the perfect environment for the microbe, and the microbe (in a microbial fuel cell) transforms nutrients in dirty water into energy to power the robotic components, and the robotic components provide mobility (3).

A team from Switzerland has been working on a project that endows a robot with the ability to react in response to environmental stress of a plant in order to maintain the state of the plant. The robotic devices monitor the changes in morphology and electrical activity of the avocado plants. According to these parameters, it classifies the drought level and triggers irrigation when necessary (4).

Some of the artists like James Stone, who is a Media Artist specializing in digital technologies and fabrication, are interested in seeing if plants are prone to act in certain ways, show preference and possibly display other traits such as emotion. Artists are specifically curious as to what would happen when a plant is augmented with technology but also given full control over such technology to do with it whatever it chooses (5). To see the results of such systems that provides a means for the plant to interact with people or things will surely be fascinating. A study in this line of research is done by a group of researchers in mobile robotics at ETH Zürich, whose long-term research goal is also to bestow machines with the ability to gain and employ knowledge from the universe to improve their intelligence, by building a prototype called iRobot Create. This cyborg plant consists of a computer running Linux, a normal plant and additional sensors and lives its own life, following its internal needs of water, sunlight and electrical energy (6). The cyborg stays away from obstacles using ultrasonic sensors, finds the best light spot using light sensors and goes to a recharge and to a mock-up water station using iRobot’s infrared sensor. Moreover, its sensors pick up noise caused by people moving around nearby, allowing cyborg plant to react by moving out of the way, to prevent themselves from getting underfoot (7).

It is very important to improve the ability of robots to work successfully in a complex and harsh environment, which would increase their usages. In one of those efforts exploring the use of biological systems to control robots under changing environmental conditions, Dr. David Hu and his group from Georgia Institute of Technology (8) used the Mexican jumping bean, Laspeyresia saltitans, which consists of an empty seed housing a moth larva. Heating by the sun stimulates movements by the larva which rolls, jumps and flips by the bean. They explored this unique means of rolling locomotion and recorded bean trajectories across a series of terrain types, including one-dimensional channels and planar surfaces of varying inclination by Time-lapse videography. They found that the shell encumbers the larva’s locomotion, decreasing its speed on flat surfaces by three-fold. Interestingly, they also showed that the two-dimensional search algorithm of the bean resembles the run-and-tumble search of bacteria. When they tested this search algorithm using both an agent-based simulation and a wheeled Scribbler robot, they demonstrated that the algorithm succeeds in propelling the robot away from regions of high temperature. It is amazing that from a study that involves a plant seed, a moth larva and a robot, scientists may develop applications in biomimetic micro-scale navigation systems.

The hi-tech devices that have been inspired by biological systems are not limited by the ones stimulated with plants. The insect world also represents a huge and original database for future bio-inspired systems, vehicles, and micro-vehicles (9). For example, the process of motion detection system in the fly’s eye is a good example of a neural circuit that was used for robot automatic piloting. Recently, a novel bat-like unmanned aerial vehicle inspired by the morphing-wing mechanism of bats has been presented (10). Other than that, body undulation used by snakes and the physical structure of the body of a snake may offer major advantages over typical legged or wheeled locomotion designs in certain types of scenarios, therefore a large number of research groups have developed snake-inspired robots to make use of these benefits (11). Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm which has similar motions with snakes but with a simpler structure, was also selected to develop a small crawling robot with a thermal shape memory alloy, a homogeneous mixture or solid solution of two or more metal, as an actuator (a type of motor for moving or controlling a mechanism or system) due to the similarities of its properties to C. elegans muscles. (12).

Not only multicellular organisms but also unicellular (single-celled) organisms are utilized for generating cyborgs; for example, scientists used circuits prepared from Physarum polycephalum, amoeboid plasmodia of the slime mold, to control an omni-directional hexapod robot. Sensory signals from the macro-physical environment of the robot are transduced to cellular scale and processed using the unique micro-physical characteristics of intracellular information processing and the response from the cellular computation is amplified to yield a macroscopic output action in the environment mediated through the robot’s actuators(1).

In addition, a new biorobotic system using human neuroblastoma cultures was introduced in 2011 by a Spanish engineering group (13). Multielectrode Arrays Setups have been designed for direct culturing neural cells over silicon or glass substrates. The main objective of this work is to run a robot using this biological neuroprocessor and the final system could be used for many things such as testing how chemicals influence the behavior of the robot.

In summary, manipulation of robots that use living organisms as an interface to perceive the environment and transfer their responses into functions seem to have endless applications as well as challenges. Biologically-inspired technologies represent an emerging and promising field of interdisciplinary areas composed of engineering, computer sciences, chemistry, biology, physics and even art. In nature there are so many living and non-living elements designed by God to help us develop and improve robots to make our lives easier, better and more productive. Even a flower can offer us with something more than color and scent, and that is if we start thinking outside the box like so many people mentioned above have done.

Safiye Arslan is a Research fellow in the area of molecular biology in Nevada.

References

1. Tsuda, S., Zauner, K. P., & Gunji, Y. P. (2006). Robot Control: From Silicon Circuitry to Cells, Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology (pp. 20-32). Osaka, Japan: Springer.

2. H. K. Park, S. H. Park, J. O. Park, (2007) “A study on the Moving Mechanism for Flower Robot,” International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems.

3. http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2010/09/a-cyborg-arboretum/

4. http://www.cyborgplant.com/

5. http://www.manofstone.com/cyborgplants/

6. Stocker, J., Veillat, A., Magnenat, S., Colas, F., Siegwart, R. (2011). Towards Adaptive Robotic Green Plants. TAROS 2011: 422-423

7. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128305.900-robotassisted-plants-find-their-place-in-the-sun.html

8. West, D. M., Lal, I. K., Leamy, M. J., & Hu, D. L. (2012). Locomotion of Mexican jumping beans. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 7(3), 036014. doi:10.1088/1748-3182/7/3/036014

9. http://www.ercim.eu/EU-NSF/Bionics.pdf

10. Colorado, J., Barrientos, A., Rossi, C., & Parra, C. (2012). Inertial attitude control of a bat-like morphing-wing air vehicle. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 8(1), 016001. doi:10.1088/1748-3182/8/1/016001

11. Hopkins, J. K., Spranklin, B. W., & Gupta, S. K. (2009). A survey of snake-inspired robot designs. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 4(2), 021001. doi:10.1088/1748-3182/4/2/021001

12. Yuk, H., Kim, D., Lee, H., Jo, S., & Shin, J. H. (2011). Shape memory alloy-based small crawling robots inspired by C. elegans. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 6(4), 046002. doi:10.1088/1748-3182/6/4/046002

13. Ferrández, J. M., Lorente, V., de Santos, D., Cuadra, J. M., de la Paz, F., Alvarez, J. R., & Fernández, E. (2011). Human neuroblastoma cultures for biorobotics. Conference proceedings : … Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference, 2011, 6672-5. doi:10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6091645

Robots that “care” are no longer merely science fiction …

Producing machines that look and behave like people seems to be a human project with a long history. Mention of a Jewish Rabbi producing an instance of the legendary golem (a creature understood to possess an active human-like body, while lacking a soul) appeared as early as the 4th century CE. The celebrated 13th-century Muslim engineer Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari undoubtedly designed, and may have constructed, what has been described in present-day terms as “the first programmable human-like robotic device” – a spectacular artifact featuring four robotic musicians performing on a floating boat (Nicks 2010). Inspired by animated life-like figures reportedly created by an ancient Greek named Ctesibus, Leonardo da Vinci – around the time in the 1400s at which he began painting his famous Last Supper – also designed a human-like robot resembling a knight in armor. Fascination with the idea of crafting convincing imitations of people appears to have been part of human history for millennia.

In more recent times, though, modern computers – and with them, research introducing so-called “artificial intelligence” (AI) – have begun to give this long-standing fascination some significant new dimensions. Perhaps the most widely recognized contemporary human-like (or, nowadays, “humanoid”) robot is a product of Japanese science and technology named “ASIMO.” Resembling a short (4 ft 3 in) astronaut wearing a backpack, ASIMO represents the fruit of several decades of research and development conducted by the Honda Motor Company. Videos on the company’s official web site show ASIMO climbing stairs, jogging, balancing on one foot, visually recognizing people by name, and serving a tray of beverages to restaurant patrons. Similar examples of this impressive humanoid robot technology exist in other countries as well – e.g., Turkey (Today’s Zaman 2010), United Arab Emirates (Fahad Inc. 2008), and South Korea (Impactlab.net 2008).

Investment by business enterprises in the significant cost and engineering effort required to design and build these curiously humanoid machines constitutes one of the “new dimensions” previously mentioned. Historical figures such as Al-Jazari and da Vinci, after all, were not responding to global marketing prospects with their robotic creations. In contrast, a current Honda Motor Company web site tells us that ASIMO was intended to be more than an attention-catching novelty from the beginning; in fact, it was “created solely to perform tasks to assist people, especially those lacking full mobility” (Honda Robotics 2011). Similarly, the president of a Robotic Industries Association reports that South Korea is “taking the lead in promoting the use of robots for service applications such as elder care” (Burnstein 2009). A former GM of the Microsoft Robotics Group has identified such assistive care as the market that “intrigues” him the most, citing approaching increases in senior populations – and, consequently, heavier burdens upon healthcare systems – as factors that may “present the ‘killer app’ for personal robots” (Foley 2009). A 2009 online report titled “Robot Nurses to Care for Japanese Elderly within Five Years” reports that Warwick University, in England, has undertaken a “three year 2.7 million dollar project to develop a robot nurse,” predicting that “nurses could be delegating tasks to robotic colleagues by 2020” (Zygbotics 2009).

It is important to note that such robotic “colleagues” of human nurses commonly are intended to be suited for fairly intimate kinds of social interactions with people. One finds, for instance, references to robotic assistance in recreation and with feeding, grooming, walking, bathing, etc. (Babyboomercaretaker.com 2007). Accordingly, we encounter another new dimension. Robotic arms have welded and painted in our automobile factories for decades, but the repetitive activities of these familiar industrial robots are profoundly different from interaction with a humanoid machine that helps one’s aging grandmother eat her dinner and take her medicine (perhaps even chatting and playing a card game with her). Moreover, the latter type of robot no longer is mere science fiction; design and construction of machines to perform these kinds of personal human-robot interactions are taking place now.

… and these robots that “care” invite some questions

Considered only as machines meant to assist overburdened nurses with their care of older people, the types of humanoid robots just described might initially be categorized simply as useful new tools. We have reasons to wonder, though, how long those who will be interacting regularly with these life-like robots can be expected to perceive them merely as tools. So-called “animaloid” robots, such as the robotic dog AIBO that was marketed in recent years by the Sony Corporation, admittedly represent a somewhat different class of robotic artifact than the more complex contemporary humanoids such as ASIMO. Nevertheless, empirical studies of human-robot interaction even with AIBO have uncovered some relevant thought-provoking surprises. Not long ago, for example, numerous online postings by owners of AIBO began appearing on Internet forums. One study of these postings noted the following confession by an AIBO owner:

The other day I proved to myself that I do indeed treat him as if he were alive, because I was getting changed to go out, and [AIBO] was in the room, but before I got changed I stuck him in a corner so he didn’t see me! (Friedman, Kahn, and Hagman 2003, 278)

Regardless of whether this posted confession was altogether truthful, its expressed thought of needing modesty in this case clearly alerts us to the potential psychological potency of human interaction with such machines. Abrahamic religions, through their shared accounts of the Garden of Eden, have long recognized appropriateness of modesty between even the primordial man and woman – but application of that sentiment to our dealings with a battery-operated dog suggests how plastic human notions of personhood might be!

For that matter, professional testimony of such plasticity for the specific case of humanoid robots is available in a frequently-quoted set of observations by Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of her MIT colleagues, widely-recognized roboticist Rodney Brooks, is among the many people who have cited Turkle’s report of her first encounter with his experimental humanoid robot, Cog; note carefully Sherry’s candid description of the experience:

Cog “noticed” me soon after I entered its room. Its head turned to follow me and I was embarrassed to note that this made me happy. I found myself competing with another visitor for its attention. At one point, I felt sure that Cog’s eyes had “caught” my own. My visit left me shaken – not by anything that Cog was able to accomplish but by my own reaction to “him.” For years whenever I had heard Rodney Brooks speak about his robotic “creatures,” I had always been careful to mentally put quotation marks around the word. But now, with Cog, I had found the quotation marks had disappeared. Despite myself and despite my continuing skepticism about this research project, I had behaved as though in the presence of another being. (Brooks 2003, 149)

Professor Turkle’s testimony is consistent with an entire literature of contemporary research in human-robot interaction that suggests a deep human predisposition progressively to accept as peers various machines that convincingly mimic human appearance and autonomous behavior. Her reference to discovering herself behaving as though she were “in the presence of another being” points, in turn, toward some questions that invite our reflection.

First, one might inquire whether (and why) it could matter that humans seem so inclined to regard convincingly humanoid machines as peers. For some people, it apparently does not matter. From his perspective as a practicing Zen Buddhist, for example, robotics engineer Masahiro Mori has argued against insisting upon any profound distinction between persons and robots, noting that there “must also be buddha-nature in the machines and robots that my colleagues and I make” (Mori 1999, 174). In contrast, though, a pilot study has suggested that Abrahamic theistic belief in creation of individual human souls by a personal deity may be related to disapproval of human-robot interaction “with life-like personal robots that requires human acceptance of the robots at intimate levels” (Metzler and Lewis 2008, 22). This finding resonates with a respected voice in modern Christian theology. Paul Tillich, in Volume Three of his monumental Systematic Theology, addresses “objects that are produced by the technical act,” warning that “by virtue of producing and directing mere things” one can lose one’s “character as an independent self” and “become a thing” (74). Again, Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, widely remembered for his distinction between “I – Thou” and “I – It” relations, issues a similar warning in I and Thou:

And in all the seriousness of truth, hear this: without It man cannot live.

But he who lives with It alone is not a man. (34)

Apparently, we have reasons to expect that individuals belonging to Abrahamic religious traditions may especially feel troubled when they find themselves treating humanoid machines as though they were peers.

Within the Abrahamic religious family, after all, human beings historically have been regarded as spiritually special, and understood as belonging to a category fundamentally different from any technological artifacts that they might construct for amusement, or as tools. Anglican priest (and physicist) John Polkinghorne has emphasized significance of “the mystery of the human person,” which involves “our embodied nature, embedded in the physical world but transcending a merely reductive physicality” (Polkinghorne 1998, 80). Both the mystery and the transcendence that Polkinghorne mentions are punctuated clearly, as well, in the Holy Qur’an: And they will ask thee of the Spirit. SAY: The Spirit proceedeth at my Lord’s command: but of knowledge, only a little to you is given (The Night Journey – Sura 17:85). The theistic perspective of this family of religions tends to link the human person, as a free moral agent, with a spiritual level of reality that is not completely expressible in terms of everyday (macro-level) entities such as rocks and trees – and machines.

It may be pertinent at this point to inquire whether the spiritual level of reality envisioned by these religious faiths might arguably be represented even in current science. To be sure, the robotic and AI technologies upon which we have focused in this essay are discussed almost entirely nowadays with so-called “macro-level” accounts of discrete, individualized entities. Computer scientists typically view all “information processing” executed by contemporary computers as reducible to operations of the celebrated Turing Machine formalism, which imagines an abstract machine successively “reading” well-defined symbols (0 or 1) on an external tape, comparing them with its current internal “state,” and then implementing clearly prescribed (albeit possibly null) changes on the tape and its own internal state. Physicists working with quantum mechanics, however, have discovered a quite different level of reality that requires a so-called “quantum-level” description. The description is expressed mathematically in terms of complex numbers (incorporating an imaginary unit equal to the square root of negative one) and it explores a reality in which individualized entities of the macro-level (this table, that book, etc.) simply are no longer present. An atom may be understood to contain four electrons, but – in principle – one cannot select and track, say, the changing locations over time of a specific individual electron among the four. Pondering this strange new reality, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has argued (via his Shadows of the Mind) that human consciousness cannot be modeled in terms of the Turing Machine formalism, requiring, instead, the resources of an advanced quantum physics. If the emerging technology of “quantum computers” eventually could yield a machine consistent with Roger Penrose’s understanding of how the human brain operates when we experience consciousness, future robots incorporating such computers might open possibilities for exciting new dialogue between religion and science.

Under present circumstances, though, we can discern the outlines of potential difficulties in the not-so-distant future. Specifically, elderly members of the Abrahamic faiths may find themselves increasingly conflicted in responding to robotic “caregivers.” On one hand, following natural predispositions, they will be inclined to accept the machines as caregivers (dropping the skeptical quotation marks, as Professor Turkle did during her encounter with Cog). At the same time, they may retain their religious worldviews and resist accepting the machines as persons. Will they feel authentically comforted, then, by machines programmed to display “artificial empathy”? Will they discover resolution of their conflict in the following conjecture by noted roboticist Hans Moravec?

So, it may be appropriate to say “God” has granted a soul to a machine when the machine is accepted as a real person by a wide human community. (Moravec 1999, 77)

Indeed, in perhaps the next ten years or so, how will people be using quotation marks to distinguish what they consider authentic from mere “make-believe”? Will they be describing new robot nurses as persons – or as “persons”? Will they decide that the machines care for people – or “care” for people? Will the artifacts be considered capable of moral behavior – or “moral” behavior? Will some older people still understand the granting of souls to be determined by God – or by “God”?

For some of us, these already are important questions.

Theodore Albert Metzler is the Director of Darrell W. Hughes Program for Religion and Science Dialogue, Oklahoma City University.

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