Grab and Grasp:
Robotic grasping and learning is becoming sophisticated enough that people may soon be able to simply gesture to any object that they want and, without needing to program specifics, rely on a robot to retrieve it. A robot demonstrated this year at Georgia Tech, El-E (pronounced "Ellie"), a wheeled, one-armed robot, follows a green laser pointer to retrieve objects. Later in the year, the group gave El-E new abilities based on how dogs respond to humans. Another grasper, the UMass Mobile Manipulator--UMan, for short--demonstrated that it could learn how to use new objects. Just as humans learn by testing an object, UMan is able to experiment and learn by playing with objects, including scissors, shears, and wooden toys.
Stomach Explorers:
While doctors have used capsule cameras for the past few years to image the insides of patients, they hope for ways to control such a camera so that it pauses at areas of interest. A group in Germany uses a magnetic device outside the body to control the movement of a pill camera while researchers at Carnegie Mellon University created a robot capsule that can anchor on delicate internal tissue without damaging it.
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