Tag Archives: Skolian Empire

nanoBIDS; military robots from prototype to working model; prosthetics, the wave of the future?

The Nanowerk website is expanding. From their news item,

Nanowerk, the leading information provider for all areas of nanotechnologies, today added to its nanotechnology information portal a new free service for buyers and vendors of micro- and nanotechnology equipment and services. The new application, called nanoBIDS, is now available on the Nanowerk website. nanoBIDS facilitates the public posting of Requests for Proposal (RFPs) for equipment and services from procurement departments in the micro- and nanotechnologies community. nanoBIDS is open to all research organizations and companies.

I checked out the nanoBIDS page and found RFP listings from UK, US (mostly), and Germany. The earliest are dated Jan.25, 2010 so this site is just over a week old and already has two pages.

The Big Dog robot (which I posted about briefly here) is in the news again. Kit Eaton (Fast Company) whose article last October first alerted me to this device now writes that the robot is being put into production. From the article (Robocalypse Alert: Defense Contract Awarded to Scary BigDog),

The contract’s been won by maker Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot–“first walk-out” of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012.

LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It’s a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles.

They have included a video of the prototype on a beach in Thailand and as Eaton notes, the robot is “disarmingly ‘cute'” and, to me, its legs look almost human-shaped, which leads me to my next bit.

I found another article on prosthetics this morning and it’s a very good one. Written by Paul Hochman for Fast Company [ETA March 23, 2022: an updated version of the article is now on Genius.com], Bionic Legs, iLimbs, and Other Super-Human Prostheses delves further into the world where people may be willing to trade a healthy limb for a prosthetic. From the article,

There are many advantages to having your leg amputated.

Pedicure costs drop 50% overnight. A pair of socks lasts twice as long. But Hugh Herr, the director of the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab, goes a step further. “It’s actually unfair,” Herr says about amputees’ advantages over the able-bodied. “As tech advancements in prosthetics come along, amputees can exploit those improvements. They can get upgrades. A person with a natural body can’t.”

I came across both a milder version of this sentiment and a more targeted version (able-bodied athletes worried about double amputee Oscar Pistorius’ bid to run in the Olympics rather than the Paralympics) when I wrote my four part series on human enhancement (July 22, 23, 24 & 27, 2009).

The Hochman article also goes on to discuss some of the aesthetic considerations (which I discussed in the same posting where I mentioned the BigDog robots). What Hochman does particularly well is bringing all this information together and explaining how the lure of big money (profit) is stimulating market development,

Not surprisingly, the money is following the market. MIT’s Herr cofounded a company called iWalk, which has received $10 million in venture financing to develop the PowerFoot One — what the company calls the “world’s first actively powered prosthetic ankle and foot.” Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs recently gave Brown University’s Center for Restorative and Regenerative Medicine a $7 million round of funding, on top of the $7.2 million it provided in 2004. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) has funded Manchester, New Hampshire-based DEKA Research, which is developing the Luke, a powered prosthetic arm (named after Luke Skywalker, whose hand is hacked off by his father, Darth Vader).

This influx of R&D cash, combined with breakthroughs in materials science and processor speed, has had a striking visual and social result: an emblem of hurt and loss has become a paradigm of the sleek, modern, and powerful. Which is why Michael Bailey, a 24-year-old student in Duluth, Georgia, is looking forward to the day when he can amputate the last two fingers on his left hand.

“I don’t think I would have said this if it had never happened,” says Bailey, referring to the accident that tore off his pinkie, ring, and middle fingers. “But I told Touch Bionics I’d cut the rest of my hand off if I could make all five of my fingers robotic.”

This kind of thinking is influencing surgery such that patients are asking to have more of their bodies removed.

The article is lengthy (by internet standards) and worthwhile as it contains nuggets such as this,

But Bailey is most surprised by his own reaction. “When I’m wearing it, I do feel different: I feel stronger. As weird as that sounds, having a piece of machinery incorporated into your body, as a part of you, well, it makes you feel above human. It’s a very powerful thing.”

So the prosthetic makes him “feel above human,” interesting, eh? It leads to the next question (and a grand and philosophical one it is), what does it mean to be human? At least lately, I tend to explore that question by reading fiction.

I have been intrigued by Catherine Asaro‘s Skolian Empire series of books. The series features human beings (mostly soldiers) who have something she calls ‘biomech’  in their bodies to make them smarter, stronger, and faster. She also populates worlds with people who’ve had (thousands of years before) extensive genetic manipulation so they can better adapt to their new homeworlds. Her characters represent different opinions about the ‘biomech’ which is surgically implanted usually in adulthood and voluntarily. Asaro is a physicist who writes ‘hard’ science fiction laced with romance. She handles a great many thorny social questions in the context of this Skolian Empire that she has created where the technologies (nano, genetic engineering, etc.)  that we are exploring are a daily reality.