Ken Goldberg: Cloud Robotics and Next Gen Surgery Robots
BCNM co-founder and director emeritus Ken Goldberg was recently interviewed by the NY Times for two separate pieces.
Goldberg was an early pioneer in remote control of robots and with the advent of cloud computing, Goldberg and other roboticists are exploring the possibilities of cloud robotics and how individual robots connected to a cloud can collect information and share processing power, allowing for accelerated robot learning.
On a related note, Goldberg has recently helped found the Center for Automation and Learning for Medical Robotics at UC Berkeley, which focuses on the creation and improvement of medical robots to minimize the invasiveness of surgery and allow for the automation of certain kinds of routine surgery.
Here are some of the experiments with these robots, with video footage provided by the Berkeley Lab for Automation Science and Engineering: