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A rover trolling Mars stops to check out a rock. From the machine, a tiny hand emerges and brushes gently across the Martian stone's surface. Back on Earth, a geologist wearing a high-tech glove feels the rock and discerns that it's particularly rough -- probably evidence of recent volcanic activity.
Sounds far-fetched? Not according to Allison M. Okamura. A mechanical engineer at Johns Hopkins University, Okamura is a leader in the blossoming field of advanced robotics. Her groundbreaking research has garnered interest from NASA, which hopes to incorporate her tactile tech for robots into future Mars missions.
Okamura works with a "haptic" interface that could someday allow physicians to guide a surgical robot endowed with tactile technology
Photo by Jay Van Rensselaer
USEFUL SENSATIONS. Fondling rocks on distant planets with the discrimination of a human geologist would be just one application. When exploring ocean depths, water can be so murky that vision is next to useless, "so you have to rely on touch to feel your way around," Okamura notes. Diver robots with supersensitive fingers might be capable of distinguishing between, say, mud, deep-sea crustaceans, and a sunken ship's hull. Eventually, she says, a marine robot's touch could be so sensitive that it could tell roughly how long a ship has been submerged by feeling the amount of accumulated corrosion.
It may sound like future shock. But doctors are already performing completely robotic heart surgery with full Food & Drug Administration approval. Two companies build surgical robots that have better dexterity than a skilled surgeon and can be inserted through small slits in the body. The only drawback: These robots don't give tactile feedback to doctors. Nor can they distinguish between textures or shapes, a subtle but important difference that could give scientists and surgeons alike significantly more useful feedback.
Adding tactile sensations would mark a major change in the way robots interact with their surroundings and with humans. "There has been lots of work on giving robots a sense of touch so they can manipulate objects in factories, but I'm really interested in touch for exploration," she explains. "To me, that's more exciting than factory automation," says Okamura.
DECIPHERING TOUCH. The engineer developed her first robot fingers in the late 1990s as a Stanford University graduate student. They used pressure sensors embedded in plastic-foam "flesh" covered by a rubber "skin." Now, she's working on a design with a rotating ball at the fingertip. Backed by pressure sensors, the ball would allow the hand to collect delicate tactile impressions as it rolls across a surface.
But teaching robots to translate touch is no easy feat. Although scientists have developed sophisticated computer models of human sight for artificial-vision systems, similar models don't yet exist for touch, Okamura laments. "So we've got a lot of work ahead," she says.
Furthermore, human tactile definitions are often subjective. Identifying gross shapes and sizes is already possible under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, she says, and should be feasible outside the lab in five years. This should be in time for NASA's Red Planet missions late in this decade. But emulating the full range of human touch may still take many more years to refine.
VICARIOUS FEELING. Sometime in the future, Okamura thinks her touchy-feely robots might eventually migrate to everyday use. She hopes to develop some working haptic, or tactile, models, including cybergloves that could enable every desktop owner to caress a Mars rock.
Okamura already has some real-world experience in this area. While at Stanford, she worked part-time for Immersion Corp., a small San Jose (Calif.) company that was a pioneer in putting haptic technology on the map. For instance, Logitech's force-feedback computer mouse uses Immersion's technology. The prototype touch system that Okamura helped developed for Immersion has a joystick-controlled stylus that enables a user to "feel" virtual objects in three dimensions.
Currently, Johns Hopkins' haptic lab is staffed only by Okamura and one undergraduate student. "But eventually, I'd like to have five PhD students," she says. For that, she may have to reach out and touch NASA to snag additional research money.
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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