A Special Something Between Robots and Humans?

Revolutions within revolutions
Here, over two decades deep into humanity’s 21st century, with billions of dollars spent in researching and developing robots, four stand out as the most revolutionary of their kind: the surgical robot, the wearable robot, and the cobot (single- and dual arm).

All four work closely with humans, all four have redefined the nature of work, and all four have spawned multi-billion-dollar industries that heretofore never existed.

Next stop for each: a long-lasting relationship with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Something that has already begun in earnest, but still has so many wonders awaiting it up the road.

The outcome for each new relationship might well be more revolutionary than the original machine. Maybe we’ll see cobots performing surgeries while surgical robots might assemble computers.

Influencing everything around them 
Their looks are stunning to behold, and their movements captivating.  They do things with those movements—intentional things—that have been purposefully engineered into their being.  They are brilliantly concepted, sleekly designed, beautiful machines that were built for a purpose. And it’s immediately apparent from watching them that a bunch of very talented somebodies care very deeply for these machines, and have poured their bodies, minds, and hearts into their creation.

The best of these machines influence everything around them. They influence the work that they perform. They influence the people who come into contact with them. They influence ever-newer ideas on collaborations previously unimagined.

Some set off a revolution, influencing the birth of new businesses, new industries, new technologies, and new relationships with other machines and processes and still other technologies.

Now that these human-built machines are taking on AI/ML, how will that new and powerful capability add to their influence? More than likely, AI will make these four even better. 

The da Vinci surgical system (Intuitive Surgical)
Imitated but never equaled, Intuitive Surgical robot systems are still going strong (since 2009) after ten years as kingpin of the operating room. At its IPO in 2000—which opened at an incredible $9 per share—the company believed it was entering a new generation of surgery, which it called “intuitive surgery”, saying that it was a “revolutionary advance similar in scope to the previous two generations of surgery —open surgery and minimally invasive surgery, or MIS.

In mid-March 2021, Intuitive Surgical hovers about at $735 per share (following a sweet 3 for 1 stock split in October (2017)).  After which shares soared more than 50 percent in the 12 months following the split. For 2020, Intuitive’s business has hit difficult times amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which forecasters say will soon ease. However, harder to confront is the waning of its patent portfolio beginning back in 2016, clearing the way for new technologies to enter the marketplace.

Credit the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) for financing SRI International’s research into “telesurgery” in the 1980s. That research was the genesis of the da Vinci surgical system. “SRI demonstrated the prototype to numerous venture capitalists and others in the early 1990s, but no one expressed serious interest until Dr. Frederic Moll in 1994.”

According to Forbes, Moll initially did not think that the SRI System had much commercial value. He told Technology Review in a 2000 article, “What got me excited wasn’t the remote-surgery aspect, but the way the system eliminated the need for a hand to be directly connected to a surgeon’s instruments.”

In 1995, after acquiring a technology license from SRI, followed by other licenses for technology from IBM and MIT, Moll and his partners incorporated Intuitive Surgical Devices, Inc.

$999 a share later (plus a stock split), Intuitive Surgical is still a phenom!

The exoskeleton: Making people “able” again
The exoskeleton, or wearable robot as it’s known to some, has been hailed as one of the greatest achievements of robotics to date. To Silke Pan, a paralyzed former trapeze acrobat trapped in a wheelchair for a decade, the exoskeleton is a new lease on living in a stand-up world. In short, for her the wearable robot is a life-changing miracle.

Provenance for the exoskeleton is often traced back to 2001, when DARPA began “a $50 million, five-year exoskeleton program. The exoskeleton program that DARPA funded was the UC Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton program, or Bleex.” Geared to assisting the military for enhancing endurance and lifting power, it wouldn’t be until 2008 that an exoskeleton appeared on the scene that was specific to medical assistance and rehabilitation. 

2008 was the year that Cyberdyne’s Yoshiyuki Sankai, a professor at Tsukuba University, founder of Cyberdyne and creator of the HAL exoskeleton, began renting out the HAL suit for medical purposes to hospitals and rehab centers in Japan.

Like the invention of the photographic camera and the automobile, many claim first invention. Success has many fathers, is how Tacitus put it in 98 A.D. As of 2020, no fewer than a dozen private companies have developed wearable robots. To their credit, none scream for recognition as the first; they are all probably too humbled by their tech quest to let ego get in the way.  

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that there are 65 million people on the planet disabled enough to require a wheelchair. Most have no access to a wheelchair let alone to an exoskeleton, most of which carry price tags of between $40k and $70k. A recent Technavio report, Global Exoskeleton Robots Market 2016-2020, forecasts the global exoskeleton market to grow at a CAGR of 50.85 percent; revenue recognized from that growth ($36.5 million in 2015) to $2.1 billion by 2020.

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