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Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders -- all free! For full access and benefits, join IEEE as a paying member. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN BiomedicalTopicTypeFeature Restoring Hearing With Beams of Light Gene therapy and optoelectronics could radically upgrade hearing for millions of people Tobias Moser 7h 13 min read A computer graphic shows a gray structure that's curled like a snail's shell. A big purple line runs through it. Many clusters of smaller red lines are scattered throughout the curled structure. Human hearing depends on the cochlea, a snail-shaped structure in the inner ear. A new kind of cochlear implant for people with disabling hearing loss would use beams of light to stimulate the cochlear nerve. Lakshay Khurana and Daniel Keppeler Blue There's a popular misconception that cochlear implants restore natural hearing. In fact, these marvels of engineering give people a new kind of "electric hearing" that they must learn how to use. Natural hearing results from vibrations hitting tiny structures called hair cells within the cochlea in the inner ear. A cochlear implant bypasses the damaged or dysfunctional parts of the ear and uses electrodes to directly stimulate the cochlear nerve, which sends signals to the brain. When my hearing-impaired patients have their cochlear implants turned on for the first time, they often report that voices sound flat and robotic and that background noises blur together and drown out voices. Although users can have many sessions with technicians to "tune" and adjust their implants' settings to make sounds more pleasant and helpful, there's a limit to what can be achieved with today's technology. I have been an otolaryngologist for more than two decades. My patients tell me they want more natural sound, more enjoyment of music, and most of all, better comprehension of speech, particularly in settings with background noise--the so-called cocktail party problem. For 15 years, my team at the University of Gottingen, in Germany, has been collaborating with colleagues at the University of Freiburg and beyond to reinvent the cochlear implant in a strikingly counterintuitive way: using light. We recognize that today's cochlear implants run up against hard limits of engineering and human physiology. So we're developing a new kind of cochlear implant that uses light emitters and genetically altered cells that respond to light. By using precise beams of light instead of electrical current to stimulate the cochlear nerve, we expect our optical cochlear implants to better replicate the full spectral nature of sounds and better mimic natural hearing. We aim to start clinical trials in 2026 and, if all goes well, we could get regulatory approval for our device at the beginning of the next decade. Then, people all over the world could begin to hear the light. Three 3D microscopic images show bony structures in gray, cells in glowing blue spirals, and an implant as a thin and twisting dotted line.These 3D microscopic images of mouse ear anatomy show optical implants [dotted lines] twisting through the intricate structure of a normal cochlea, which contains hair cells; in deafness, these cells are lost or damaged. At left, the hair cells [light blue spiral] connect to the cochlear nerve cells [blue filaments and dots]. In the middle and right images, the bony housing of the mouse cochlea surrounds this delicate arrangement.Daniel Keppeler How cochlear implants work Some 466 million people worldwide suffer from disabling hearing loss that requires intervention, according to the World Health Organization. Hearing loss mainly results from damage to the cochlea caused by disease, noise, or age and, so far, there is no cure. Hearing can be partially restored by hearing aids, which essentially provide an amplified version of the sound to the remaining sensory hair cells of the cochlea. Profoundly hearing-impaired people benefit more from cochlear implants, which, as mentioned above, skip over dysfunctional or lost hair cells and directly stimulate the cochlear, or auditory, nerve. In the 2030s, people all over the world could begin to hear the light. Today's cochlear implants are the most successful neuroprosthetic to date. The first device was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the 1980s, and nearly 737,000 devices had been implanted globally by 2019. Yet they make limited use of the neurons available for sound encoding in the cochlea. To understand why, you first need to understand how natural hearing works. In a functioning human ear, sound waves are channeled down the ear canal and set the ear drum in motion, which in turn vibrates tiny bones in the middle ear. Those bones transfer the vibrations to the inner ear's cochlea, a snail-shaped structure about the size of a pea. Inside the fluid-filled cochlea, a membrane ripples in response to sound vibrations, and those ripples move bundles of sensory hair cells that project from the surface of that membrane. These movements trigger the hair cells to release neurotransmitters that cause an electrical signal in the neurons of the cochlear nerve. All these electrical signals encode the sound, and the signal travels up the nerve to the brain. Regardless of which sound frequency they encode, the cochlear neurons represent sound intensity by the rate and timing of their electrical signals: The firing rate can reach a few hundred hertz, and the timing can achieve submillisecond precision. Hair cells in different parts of the cochlea respond to different frequencies of sound, with those at the base of the spiral-shaped cochlea detecting high-pitched sounds of up to about 20 kilohertz, and those at the top of the spiral detecting low-pitched sounds down to about 20 Hz. This frequency map of the cochlea is also available at the level of the neurons, which can be thought of as a spiraling array of receivers. Cochlear implants capitalize on this structure, stimulating neurons in the base of the cochlea to create the perception of a high pitch, and so on. A commercial cochlear implant today has a microphone, processor, and transmitter that are worn on the head, as well as a receiver and electrodes that are implanted. It typically has between 12 and 24 electrodes that are inserted into the cochlea to directly stimulate the nerve at different points. But the saline fluid within the cochlea is conductive, so the current from each electrode spreads out and causes broad activation of neurons across the frequency map of the cochlea. Because the frequency selectivity of electrical stimulation is limited, the quality of artificial hearing is limited, too. The natural process of hearing, in which hair cells trigger precise points on the cochlear nerve, can be thought of as playing the piano with your fingers; cochlear implants are more equivalent to playing with your fists. Even worse, this large stimulation overlap limits the way we can stimulate the auditory nerve, as it forces us to activate only one electrode at a time. Three Ways to Hear A diagram with three parts shows the differences between normal hearing, electrical cochlear implant, and optical cochlear implant. Each shows the anatomy of the middle and inner ear, including the spiral shaped cochlea.Chris Philpot In normal hearing, sound waves travel down the ear canal and vibrate the ear drum and tiny bones in the middle ear. Those vibrations then reach the spiral-shaped cochlea and move bundles of sensory hair cells. When the hair cells respond, it triggers a neural signal that travels up the cochlear nerve to the brain. Hair cells at the base of the spiral respond to high-pitched sounds; those at the tip respond to low-pitched sounds. With an electrical cochlear implant, a microphone, processor, and transmitter are worn behind the ear. The processor translates a sound's pattern of frequencies into a crude stimulation pattern, which is transmitted to an implanted receiver and then to an electrode array that spirals through the cochlea. A limited number of electrodes (12 are shown here) directly stimulate the cells of the cochlear nerve. But each electrical pulse spreads out and stimulates off-target nerve cells, which results in muddier sound. In a future optical cochlear implant, the external hardware could remain the same, though the processor could break up the sound into narrower frequency bands and transmit a more sophisticated stimulation pattern. The light source, either a flexible micro-LED array or optical fibers, would spiral through the cochlea, and the implant could have many more stimulation sites, because light is more easily confined in space than electrical current is. The user would have a gene-therapy treatment to make the cells of the cochlear nerve responsive to light, which would trigger precise signals that travel up the nerve to the brain. How optogenetics works The idea for a better way began back in 2005, when I started hearing about a new technique being pioneered in neuroscience called optogenetics. German researchers were among the first to discover light-sensitive proteins in algae that regulated the flow of ions across a cellular membrane. Then, other research groups began experimenting with taking the genes that coded for such proteins and using a harmless viral vector to insert them into neurons. The upshot was that shining a light on these genetically altered neurons could trigger them to open their voltage-gated ion channels and thus fire, or activate, allowing researchers to directly control living animals' brains and behaviors. Since then, optogenetics has become a significant tool in neuroscience research, and clinicians are experimenting with medical applications including vision restoration and cardiac pacing. I've long been interested in how sound is encoded and how this coding goes wrong in hearing impairment. It occurred to me that stimulating the cochlear nerve with light instead of electricity could provide much more precise control, because light can be tightly focused even in the cochlea's saline environment. We are proposing a new type of implanted medical device that will be paired with a new type of gene therapy. If we used optogenetics to make cochlear nerve cells light sensitive, we could then precisely hit these targets with beams of low-energy light to produce much finer auditory sensations than with the electrical implant. We could theoretically have more than five times as many targets spaced throughout the cochlea, perhaps as many as 64 or 128. Sound stimuli could be electronically split up into many more discrete frequency bands, giving users a much richer experience of sound. This general idea had been taken up earlier by Claus-Peter Richter from Northwestern University, who proposed directly stimulating the auditory nerve with high-energy infrared light, though that concept wasn't confirmed by other laboratories. Our idea was exciting, but my collaborators and I saw a host of challenges. We were proposing a new type of implanted medical device that would be paired with a new type of gene therapy, both of which must meet the highest safety standards. We'd need to determine the best light source to use in the optogenetic system and how to transmit it to the proper spots in the cochlea. We had to find the right light-sensitive protein to use in the cochlear nerve cells, and we had to figure out how best to deliver the genes that code for those proteins to the right parts of the cochlea. But we've made great progress over the years. In 2015, the European Research Council gave us a vote of confidence when it funded our "OptoHear" project, and in 2019, we spun off a company called OptoGenTech to work toward commercializing our device. Channelrhodopsins, micro-LEDs, and fiber optics Our early proof-of-concept experiments in mice explored both the biology and technology at play in our mission. Finding the right light-sensitive protein, or channelrhodopsin, turned out to be a long process. Many early efforts in optogenetics used channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) that opens an ion channel in response to blue light. We used it in a proof-of-concept experiment in mice that demonstrated that optogenetic stimulation of the auditory pathway provided better frequency selectivity than electrical stimulation did. In our continued search for the best channelrhodopsin for our purpose, we tried a ChR2 variant called calcium translocating channelrhodopsin (CatCh) from the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics lab of Ernst Bamberg, one of the world pioneers of optogenetics. We delivered CatCh to the cochlear neurons of Mongolian gerbils using a harmless virus as a vector. We next trained the gerbils to respond to an auditory stimulus, teaching them to avoid a certain area when they heard a tone. Then we deafened the gerbils by applying a drug that kills hair cells and inserted a tiny optical cochlear implant to stimulate the light-sensitized cochlear neurons. The deaf animals responded to this light stimulation just as they had to the auditory stimulus. The optical cochlear implant will enable people to pick out voices in a busy meeting and appreciate the subtleties of their favorite songs. However, the use of CatCh has two problems: First, it requires blue light, which is associated with phototoxicity. When light, particularly high-energy blue light, shines directly on cells that are typically in the dark of the body's interior, these cells can be damaged and eventually die off. The other problem with CatCh is that it's slow to reset. At body temperature, once CatCh is activated by light, it takes about a dozen milliseconds to close the channel and be ready for the next activation. Such slow kinetics do not support the precise timing of neuron activation necessary to encode sound, which can require more than a hundred spikes per second. Many people said the kinetics of channelrhodopsins made our quest impossible--that even if we gained spectral resolution, we'd lose temporal resolution. But we took those doubts as a strong motivation to look for faster channelrhodopsins, and ones that respond to red light. We were excited when a leader in optogenetics, Edward Boyden at MIT, discovered a faster-acting channelrhodopsin that his team called Chronos. Although it still required blue light for activation, Chronos was the fastest channelrhodopsin to date, taking about 3.6 milliseconds to close at room temperature. Even better, we found that it closed within about 1 ms at the warmer temperature of the body. However, it took some extra tricks to get Chronos working in the cochlea: We had to use powerful viral vectors and certain genetic sequences to improve the delivery of Chronos protein to the cell membrane of the cochlear neurons. With those tricks, both single neurons and the neural population responded robustly and with good temporal precision to optical stimulation at higher rates of up to about 250 Hz. So Chronos enabled us to elicit near-natural rates of neural firing, suggesting that we could have both frequency and time resolution. But we still needed to find an ultrafast channelrhodopsin that operated with longer wavelength light. We teamed up with Bamberg to take on the challenge. The collaboration targeted Chrimson, a channelrhodopsin first described by Boyden that's best stimulated by orange light. The first results of our engineering experiments with Chrimson were fast Chrimson (f-Chrimson) and very fast Chrimson (vf-Chrimson). We were pleased to discover that f-Chrimson enables cochlear neurons to respond to red light reliably up to stimulation rates of approximately 200 Hz. Vf-Chrimson is even faster but is less well expressed in the cells than f-Chrimson is; so far, vf-Chrimson has not shown a measurable advantage over f-Chrimson when it comes to high-frequency stimulation of cochlear neurons. Two micrograph images each show a glass rod with a thin, flexible tape wrapped around it in a spiral. In the image at left, the tape is clear with tiny black squares all along its length. In the image at right, the squares are glowing with light blue light. This flexible micro-LED array, fabricated at the University of Freiburg, is wrapped around a glass rod that's 1 millimeter in diameter. The array is shown with its 144 diodes turned off [left] and operating at 1 milliamp [right]. University of Freiburg/Frontiers We've also been exploring our options for the implanted light source that will trigger the optogenetic cells. The implant must be small enough to fit into the limited space of the cochlea, stiff enough for surgical insertion, yet flexible enough to gently follow the cochlea's curvature. Its housing must be biocompatible, transparent, and robust enough to last for decades. My collaborators Ulrich Schwarz and Patrick Ruther, then at the University of Freiburg, started things off by developing the first micro-light-emitting diodes (micro-LEDs) for optical cochlear implants. We found micro-LEDs useful because they're a very mature commercial technology with good power efficiency. We conducted several experiments with microfabricated thin-film micro-LEDs and demonstrated that we could optogenetically stimulate the cochlear nerve in our targeted frequency ranges. But micro-LEDs have drawbacks. For one thing, it's difficult to establish a flexible, transparent, and durable hermetic seal around the implanted micro-LEDs. Also, micro-LEDs with the highest efficiency emit blue light, which brings us back to the phototoxicity problem. That's why we're also looking at another way forward. Instead of getting the semiconductor emitter itself into the cochlea, the alternative approach puts the light source, such as a laser diode, farther away in a hermetically sealed titanium housing. Optical fibers then bring the light into the cochlea and to the light-sensitive neurons. The optical fibers must be biocompatible, durable, and flexible enough to wind through the cochlea, which may be challenging with typical glass fibers. There's interesting ongoing research in flexible polymer fibers, which might have better mechanical characteristics, but so far, they haven't matched glass in efficiency of light propagation. The fiber-optic approach could have efficiency drawbacks, because we'd lose some light when it goes from the laser diode to the fiber, when it travels down the fiber, and when it goes from the fiber to the cochlea. But the approach seems promising, as it ensures that the optoelectronic components could be safely sealed up and would likely make for an easy insertion of the flexible waveguide array. Two micrograph images show thin black tubes of varying lengths with tips that glow with a reddish light. Another design possibility for optical cochlear implants is to use laser diodes as a light source and pair them with optical fibers made of a flexible polymer. The laser diode could be safely encapsulated outside the cochlea, which would reduce concerns about heat, while polymer waveguide arrays [left and right images] would curl into the cochlea to deliver the light to the cells.OptoGenTech The road to clinical trials As we consider assembling these components into a commercial medical device, we first look for parts of existing cochlear implants that we can adopt. The audio processors that work with today's cochlear implants can be adapted to our purpose; we'll just need to split up the signal into more channels with smaller frequency ranges. The external transmitter and implanted receiver also could be similar to existing technologies, which will make our regulatory pathway that much easier. But the truly novel parts of our system--the optical stimulator and the gene therapy to deliver the channelrhodopsins to the cochlea--will require a good amount of scrutiny. Cochlear implant surgery is quite mature and typically takes only a couple of hours at most. To keep things simple, we want to keep our procedure as close as possible to existing surgeries. But the key part of the surgery will be quite different: Instead of inserting electrodes into the cochlea, surgeons will first administer viral vectors to deliver the genes for the channelrhodopsin to the cochlear nerve cells, and then implant the light emitter into the cochlea. Hearing Upgrade Today's electrical cochlear implants divide rich sounds up into a small number of frequency bands and send the signals to a limited number of electrodes. Optical cochlear implants could have many more stimulation sites, meaning that sound could be divided into many more frequency bands. Original 8 channels 64 channels Since optogenetic therapies are just beginning to be tested in clinical trials, there's still some uncertainty about how best to make the technique work in humans. We're still thinking about how to get the viral vector to deliver the necessary genes to the correct neurons in the cochlea. The viral vector we've used in experiments thus far, an adeno-associated virus, is a harmless virus that has already been approved for use in several gene therapies, and we're using some genetic tricks and local administration to target cochlear neurons specifically. We've already begun gathering data about the stability of the optogenetically altered cells and whether they'll need repeated injections of the channelrhodopsin genes to stay responsive to light. Our roadmap to clinical trials is very ambitious. We're working now to finalize and freeze the design of the device, and we have ongoing preclinical studies in animals to check for phototoxicity and prove the efficacy of the basic idea. We aim to begin our first-in-human study in 2026, in which we'll find the safest dose for the gene therapy. We hope to launch a large phase 3 clinical trial in 2028 to collect data that we'll use in submitting the device for regulatory approval, which we could win in the early 2030s. We foresee a future in which beams of light can bring rich soundscapes to people with profound hearing loss or deafness. We hope that the optical cochlear implant will enable them to pick out voices in a busy meeting, appreciate the subtleties of their favorite songs, and take in the full spectrum of sound--from trilling birdsongs to booming bass notes. We think this technology has the potential to illuminate their auditory worlds. From Your Site Articles * Optical Cochlear Implant Turns Light Against Hearing Loss - IEEE ... > * Should Right-to-Repair Laws Extend to Bionic Body Parts? - IEEE ... > * The Long Road to Today's Cochlear Implant - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * Cochlear Implants | FDA > * How Do Cochlear Hearing Implants Work? | Cochlear > * What Are Cochlear Implants for Hearing? | NIDCD > cochlear implanthearinghearing lossoptogenetics {"imageShortcodeIds":[]} Tobias Moser Tobias Moser is a neuroscientist and otolaryngologist at the Gottingen Campus in Germany. He heads the Institute for Auditory Neuroscience at the University Medical Center Gottingen and leads research groups at the German Primate Center and the Max-Planck-Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. His main areas of research are synaptic coding and processing of auditory information, as well as innovative approaches to the restoration of hearing in the deaf such as the optogenetic cochlear implant. The Conversation (0) colorful streams of light AerospaceTopicNewsTypeTelecommunications X-Rays Could Carry Quantum Signals Across the Stars 7h 3 min read A photo of a submarine in the water under a partly cloudy sky. Artificial IntelligenceTopicTypeFeature Will AI Steal Submarines' Stealth? 16 Jul 2022 11 min read A MetaHuman character open for edits in the MetaHuman software. Consumer ElectronicsTopicTypeComputingNews Does MetaHuman's Digital Clone Cross the Uncanny Valley? 16 Jul 2022 4 min read BiomedicalTopicTypeSensorsNews A Breath Test for Monitoring Glucose Levels This e-nose can detect glucose levels with 90 percent accuracy Michelle Hampson Michelle Hampson is a freelance writer based in Halifax. She frequently contributes to Spectrum's Journal Watch coverage, which highlights newsworthy studies published in IEEE journals. 15 Jul 2022 2 min read illustration of open mouth iStockphoto e-nosemachine learningdiabetesJournal Watch This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. Diabetes is a very common condition affecting roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population--and, according to the World Health Organization, there are 422 million people living with diabetes around the world. To manage the disease, people must test their blood glucose levels several times a day, which often involves finger pricks and can be burdensome and painful. In recent years, some noninvasive, wearable devices for measuring glucose have hit the market, but these devices are typically expensive and still depend on direct sampling and interaction with blood. However, a newly designed e-nose that can measure glucose levels based on a person's breath could offer people with diabetes a different noninvasive and low-cost solution. The e-nose is described in a study published 7 June in IEEE Sensors Journal. E-noses are devices that detect and analyze chemicals in the air in real time, determining the nature of the substance at hand. They are being designed for a wide range of tasks, including sniffing out good whiskey, monitoring crops, and detecting lung cancer. Qiliang Li is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University who's been interested in developing similar technology for measuring glucose levels on a person's breath. Although glucose isn't exhaled in breath, the concentration of acetone and other ketones in the exhaled breath is associated with human metabolic conditions, including diabetes. "To alleviate the pain and danger for the patients, we created an e-nose for noninvasive, painless, low-cost, and frequent diabetes testing," says Li. "The e-nose is designed to identify the 'smell' of exhaled breath which contains certain level of acetone and other ketones. Therefore, the smell is an indicator of glucose level in the blood." The e-nose designed by Li's team contains an array of 12 different chemical sensors and a microprocessor. When the e-nose sniffs the exhaled breath, the chemical sensors will send electrical response to the microprocessor, which processes the signals into digital information. "The e-nose will then analyze the digital information with our database and give a correct number of glucose levels," explains Dr. Xiangdong Zhou, a professor at the Respiratory Department of Nanjing Medical University, in Nanjing, China, who was also involved in the study. In their study, the researchers collected breath samples from 41 study participants with a range of glucose levels and used the data to train the e-nose with a range of machine-learning algorithms until they found a combination of models that could detect glucose levels on a person's breath with 90.4 percent accuracy and an average error of 0.69 millimoles per liter (mmol/L) in blood glucose concentration. Li notes that, although the system doesn't directly measure glucose levels by blood, which is the current gold standard form of measurement, it offers several advantages. "The new e-nose enables noninvasive, painless, and low-cost measurement of glucose levels. It is designed for close monitoring of glucose levels for diabetes patients, especially for the patients with high blood sugar and Type 1 patients who need insulin medication frequently," he says. Next, Li says the team is interested in designing a new chip for the chemical sensor arrays to create a more precise e-nose. As well, he says, "We plan to recruit more patients with different body mass index (BMI), living styles, and diet for testing and build a comprehensive database of exhaled breath and glucose levels." From Your Site Articles * Graphene Wristband Senses Your Blood Sugar--and Treats It ... > * Why Noviosense's In-Eye Glucose Monitor Might Work Better Than ... > Related Articles Around the Web * Diagnosis | ADA > * Diabetes Tests | CDC > Keep Reading |Show less RoboticsNewsTypeTopic Video Friday: Robot Arms for the ISS Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Evan Ackerman Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes. 15 Jul 2022 4 min read A pair of very mechanical looking robot arms grasp a cable on a test stand video fridayrobotics Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. IEEE CASE 2022: 20-24 August 2022, MEXICO CITY CLAWAR 2022: 12-14 September 2022, AZORES, PORTUGAL ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals: 4-5 November 2022, LOS ANGELES CoRL 2022: 14-18 December 2022, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND Enjoy today's videos! GITAI will demonstrate the capabilities of its autonomous robot outside the International Space Station Bishop airlock in 2023, including thermal blanket manipulation and component installation. [ GITAI ] Thanks, Sho! Today we set up a football yard in our office and let two Bittle robot dogs play football [soccer] for the first time. The game was unexpectedly fierce with a lot of shots and combats. The gatekeeper, Sox, also did a great job, though sometimes he was absent-minded. But who can blame a little robot cat? The programmable robot dogs run on Arduino with the open source quadruped framework OpenCat. You can control robots via mobile/ desktop apps and program more advanced movements and tricks in C++ or Python. Unlike Sox, our robot dogs are real and for sale! Learn programming, robotics & AI while making your robot the hero in the playground! [ Petoi ] Thanks, Rongzhong! We humans acquire our body-model as infants, and robots are following suit. A Columbia Engineering team announced today they have created a robot that--for the first time--is able to learn a model of its entire body from scratch, without any human assistance. In a new study published by Science Robotics, the researchers demonstrate how their robot created a kinematic model of itself, and then used its self-model to plan motion, reach goals, and avoid obstacles in a variety of situations. It even automatically recognized and then compensated for damage to its body. [ Columbia ] Using biological experiments, robot models, and a geometric theory of locomotion, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology investigated how and why intermediate lizard species, with their elongated bodies and short limbs, might use their bodies to move. They uncovered the existence of a previously unknown spectrum of body movements in lizards, revealing a continuum of locomotion dynamics between lizardlike and snakelike movements. [ Georgia Tech ] NASA's VIPER team practiced driving the rover down Griffin's sizeable ramps to mimic safely egressing onto the lunar surface. Griffin's ramps were positioned in a range of average and worst-case inclines up to 33 degrees to thoroughly test how VIPER could exit the lander. [ NASA ] Existing magnetically actuated soft robots require an external magnetic field to generate motion, limiting them to carefully controlled laboratory settings. Here, we introduce an electromagnetically actuated soft robot that can locomote without an external magnetic field. The robot is designed to carry its own magnet, which it alternately retracts and repels. Friction-biased feet transform this back-and-forth linear motion into forward locomotion, mimicking an earthworm gait. [ Faboratory ] Sweet potato packing is surprisingly complex! [ Soft Robotics ] Impressions from the RoboCup 2022 Humanoid AdultSize Drop-In Tournament. Team NimbRo from University of Bonn, Germany came in first with 22 points, Team HERoEHS from Korea came in second with 5.5 points and Team RoMeLa, USA came in third. [ NimbRo ] Given randomized, known positions of a bowl and a set of utensils (fork, knife, and spoon), the robot's goal is to "set" the table for a variety of table configurations. To solve this, we use a Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) framework, PDDLStream. We also integrate an orientation constraint, which enforces that the robot keeps a bowl filled with cereal in an upright orientation! [ CSAIL ] The best thing about whole body teleoperation of robots is the suit you get to wear while you do it. [ Inria ] Shadow has merged our Shadow Dexterous Hand with our lightweight Shadow glove to give you the newest solution for dexterous manipulation and grasping. [ Shadow Hand ] Autonomous operation of the K-Max Titan Helicopter enabled by Near Earth Autonomy. [ Near Earth Autonomy ] The VoloDrone is our uncrewed, fully electric utility drone capable of carrying an impressive--and unprecedented--payload. While there are many design overlaps with the VoloCity, we created the VoloDrone to offer heavy-lift services to a slew of industries, and it will be deployed where classic transportation modes reach their limits. [ Volodrone ] Welcome to our new video series where we showcase some of the unique and interesting robots that come out of the Clearpath integration shop. In our first episode, we have a fully-loaded and autonomous Husky UGV, equipped with a Universal Robots UR5 arm, our Outdoor Navigation software and Indoor Navigation software, along with all the supporting sensors. [ Clearpath ] "ROBOTICS: The Future is Now" William Shatner (of Star Trek) talks about the Technology of Robotics in this rarely seen 1984 science documentary. [ CHAP ] This video is...strange. Like, this is absolutely not a new idea, some interesting choices have been made on the hardware side, and I'm not at all sure what to think about the software side. Plus, the website has red-flag level hype. Hmm. [ Giant AI ] Hod Lipson's MARS 2022 talk on building self-aware machines, where he describes some of his past and current work towards sentient machines. Here's another video from Hod Lipson's YouTube channel about the Golem project, which is over 20 years old and is still cool! [ Creative Machines Lab ] Kathleen McDermott will discuss her practice of hacking, DIYing, and crafting with consumer and hobbyist electronics, and demonstrate the experiments with kinematics she has developed with mentorship from the Kod Lab. Central to McDermott's work, is the idea that absurdity and play can be useful ways to reframe our relationships to technology and productivity. [ GRASP Lab ] Keep Reading |Show less BiomedicalTopicTypeComputingWebinar Modeling Microfluidic Organ-on-a-Chip Devices Register for this webinar to enhance your modeling and design processes for microfluidic organ-on-a-chip devices using COMSOL Multiphysics COMSOL 16 May 2022 1 min read Comsol Logo Comsol type:webinarmicrofluidicsCOMSOLmultiphysics simulationsimulation If you want to enhance your modeling and design processes for microfluidic organ-on-a-chip devices, tune into this webinar. You will learn methods for simulating the performance and behavior of microfluidic organ-on-a-chip devices and microphysiological systems in COMSOL Multiphysics. Additionally, you will see how to couple multiple physical effects in your model, including chemical transport, particle tracing, and fluid-structure interaction. You will also learn how to distill simulation output to find key design parameters and obtain a high-level description of system performance and behavior. There will also be a live demonstration of how to set up a model of a microfluidic lung-on-a-chip device with two-way coupled fluid-structure interaction. The webinar will conclude with a Q&A session. Register now for this free webinar! Keep Reading |Show less Trending Stories The most-read stories on IEEE Spectrum right now BiomedicalTopicTypeSensorsNews A Breath Test for Monitoring Glucose Levels 15 Jul 2022 2 min read illustration of open mouth Artificial IntelligenceTopicTypeFeature Will AI Steal Submarines' Stealth? 16 Jul 2022 11 min read A photo of a submarine in the water under a partly cloudy sky. 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