From border patrol SUVs that spot infiltrators to fetal surgery robots that swim through the amniotic sac, world "firsts" from Israel also include smart gadgets that clean your pool and know where to spray fertilizers on a farmer's fields.
Israel has become a hotbed of robotic technologies. Its academics are mastering both the mind and body of robotics for solutions in security and defense, medical devices and agriculture. The innovation starts at Israeli universities and ends with commercialized products such as SpineAssist, the new x-ray and CT scan guide manufactured by Mazor Robotics.
There is only a handful of systems that actually perform in the operating room today; maybe five," says Prof. Moshe Shoham from the Robotics Laboratory at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, whose research lay the foundation for SpineAssist. One of these five is from Israel and it's the only robotic device in the world for spinal surgery.
Other innovative technologies on the way include an unmanned border patrol all-terrain vehicle, which works as a fleet and "thinks" like a team.
A Bar-Ilan project to turn 4x4 SUVs into robots to patrol the Israeli borders is now being piloted in Israel by G-NIUS with the support of the Defense Ministry. Human border patrols are vulnerable to Hamas and Hizbullah terrorists eager to target Israeli soldiers, or worse, capture them for ransom, as was the case with captive soldier Gilad Shalit.
For military and civilian applications, Kaminka's lab is developing a special team of PointBots - search-and-rescue robots that can make a map of their location in the field and quickly plot their own trajectory of where to rescue a victim from a toppled building, or a soldier from a terrorist enclave.
In the medical field of robotics applications, Technion Prof. Moshe Shoham is a world leader. His SpineAssist robot uses CT and x-ray data to provide surgeons with precise guidance to manipulate instruments during spinal surgery, thereby minimizing damage to vital organs and surrounding nerves. It is in use daily in operating theaters in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and Russia.
Also in development in Shoham's lab is the TIPCAT, a robot that can "crawl" inside the human body to perform endoscopic surgery; and the tiny Virob robot, recently featured on CNN, which can bring a cancer drug directly to a tumor or can be outfitted with a camera for inside-the-body diagnostic purposes.
Another medical robotic device, still years away from the market, could help doctors operate in utero. "What we would like to do is insert a small capsule inside the uterus for fetal surgery and are working on how this could swim in the amniotic fluid for diagnostics and therapeutics," he says.
You may think a snake is the last thing you'd want slithering around your heart. But a new invention developed by American and Israeli scientists could save your life. Pioneered by Dr. Alon Wolf from the Technion and Prof. Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, the CardioArm is a small, flexible medical "snake" that makes heart surgeries safer and more effective.
"We are working with robotic snakes for search-and-rescue operations. So we started thinking: if we can send snakes to crawl inside buildings to look for survivors, then why can't we send the same snake inside our body to fix it?" says Alon, whose lab works with Cardiorobotics, a medical device startup, to commercialize the CardioArm in heart-related endoscopic surgeries.
Showing the world the lighter side of Israeli robotics is the company DreamBots, which has developed the world's first massage robot. Showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, DreamBots' hand-sized WheeMe features four wheels and a massaging "finger" that gives users a tickling sensation as the device maneuvers independently across a person's back.
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