Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, gave a keynote talk last month at the 2010 Connected Health Symposium in Boston. He didn't say what the company is working on in its new healthcare robots business unit, but he predicted robots will have a crucial role to play in the future of healthcare. Angle said that assistive robots will enable old or sick people to live independently for longer.

"The cost path we are on in healthcare is not sustainable," Angle said during his speech. He pointed to figures showing that the elderly often have chronic health issues that require expensive assisted living programs or nursing homes. "The numbers of seniors are going up and our ability to care for them is going down," said Angle.

Even without a chronic illness, common tasks, such as cleaning the house become more difficult for the elderly. And informal care giving by relatives can take a lot of time, and put stress on a family. "Growing old is a physical problem and needs a physical solution," Angle said. "We need a robot to go out and do physical stuff for us in order to live independently and not end up in a nursing home."

The challenges of developing such a robot are substantial. It would encounter a variety of unexpected and unpredictable situations, so it would need to be flexible and adaptable—able to move around in a messy room, pick up unfamiliar objects, or open doors. Some research robots have demonstrated a few such skills, but there is nothing that can do them all.

A home-help robot could also deliver remote medical care, Angle noted. A robot equipped with a blood pressure detector, stethoscope, a camera, and other low-cost equipment could allow doctors to perform routine check-ups remotely.

I would guess that iRobot plans to release a telepresence robot that can perform some of these functions in the next few years. Several other companies have recently launched telepresence robots—essentially video-conferencing systems on wheels—and iRobot's now cancelled ConnectR project was an early effort in this area.

Bill Townsend, CEO of Barrett Technology, which makes robotic hands and arms, listened to Angle's talk. He predicts that, within 20 to 30 years, home-help robots will be a part of everyday life. "If anyone can do it, it would be iRobot," Townsend said.

A robot known as "Cody" successfully wiped away blue candy from a test user's legs and arms without being too forceful, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology (led by assistant professor Charlie Kemp) reported at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference last month.

The elderly and people with disabilities often have trouble with daily activities, like folding laundry, getting groceries, and even maintaining personal hygiene. Robots that can put away clean dishes or sort laundry may aid people enough to let them maintain an independent lifestyle for longer in their homes or help ease some of the burden of hospital or assisted-living workers. Now Cody has added another task to robots' repertoire of personal assistance tasks: wiping down a person too bedridden or injured to bathe themselves.

A bed bath--where a nurse or family member uses a soapy sponge to clean off a patient's skin--can be an awkward social situation and make a patient feel uncomfortable. Instead, a human operator can tell Cody what parts of the patient's body to clean. Cody uses a camera and laser range finder above its torso to gather data before autonomously cleaning the area.

Chih-Hung King, first author of the work and sole test subject in the video below, reports on the experience of being wiped down by a robot:

In the beginning I felt a bit tense, but never scared. As the experiment progressed, my trust in the robot grew and my tension waned. Throughout the experiment, I suffered little-to-no discomfort.

For safety precautions, Cody's arm joints are made with low stiffness to soften any accidental impact, and the robot is programmed to never exert more than a certain amount of pressure (well below the threshold of causing any damage). And of course, a "stop" button shuts off any movement. The robot, which can also be led by a nurse holding its robotic hand, was developed in the same lab that brought us the fetching, door-opening El-E robot.

Innuendos aside, this work represents a good step for health-care robotics. As more roboticists design automatons to assist the booming elderly population and come into direct contact with humans, safety becomes even more important.

In the video below, a robot called iCub demonstrates some impressive archery skills.

What's remarkable about the robot isn't just its headdress, but how it learns over time to improve its aim until it's able to hit the bull's-eye.

Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova taught the robot how to hold the bow and fire the arrow. A learning algorithm, dubbed "archer" (Augmented Reward Chained Regression) then used visual feedback to gradually improve the robot's aim.

iCub was developed by a consortium of about a dozen European universities with the goal of mimicking and understanding cognition and learning abilities through interactions with the environment. The robot, which has visual and physical sensors, is designed to resemble a 3-year-old-child and mimic methods of learning.

The team will present their findings with the archery learning algorithm at the Humanoids 2010 conference in December.