Cyberdyne’s HAL Exoskeleton Helps Patients Walk Again in First Treatments at U.S. Facility

Patients at a Florida clinic are the only ones in the United States with access to Cyberdyne’s HAL exoskeleton, but that will change in 2019 Danny Bal was riding his brand new motorcycle to work from his home in Ocala, Florida two years ago when the driver of an oncoming car fell asleep and ploughed into Bal’s electric-blue bike.  After the accident, which crushed three of Bal’s thoracic vertebrae and shredded a spinal nerve, Bal adjusted to life in a wheelchair. He added a motorized lift to his beloved F-250 truck, explored local trails with a hand-powered bike, and joined a therapeutic horseback riding program. Now, one of Bal’s daughters is about to get married, and 57-year-old Bal wants to walk in her ceremony. So on a recent Friday morning in December at Brooks Rehabilitation in Jacksonville, Florida, Bal was back on his feet, taking slow but steady steps as his granddaughter Continue reading Cyberdyne’s HAL Exoskeleton Helps Patients Walk Again in First Treatments at U.S. Facility

Greeting Machine Explores Extreme Minimalism in Social Robots

A simple robot that does almost nothing Robots in general, and social robots in particular, tend to be very focused on functionality. When we see one, we want to know what it does, how well it does it, and whether it does those things better or worse than other robots or systems. The necessity for robots to be “useful” drives their design, but what happens when you instead design a robot that only has to do one very simple thing? The Greeting Machine is an abstract robot developed at the Media Innovation Lab (miLAB) at the IDC Herzliya, in Israel, with collaborators from Cornell University. It was conceptualized to greet people with a gesture, and do nothing else—a challenge that’s more complicated than it sounds.