Saturday, April 19, 2008

Killer Application of Robotics in the next 10 years?

Robot are successfully being used in many applications like military, household work and many industrial jobs. In the next 10 years, I think that robots can bring revolution in the field of medicine and human lifestyle. The killer applications can be as follows:

Medicine:
I think one interesting application of robotics is nano-robots . These are tiny robots which can be injected into the blood stream and which can swim in the human circulatory system. The idea is that the robot detects the cause of disease, travels to the appropriate area and provides a dose of medication directly to the infected area.
Pros: This can give you new directions of research for treating cancers. There is still no cure for many types of cancer. Nano-robots could be the way to go. A December '07 article gives simulations of virtual 3D nano-robots which would help in the research of treating Alzheimer's disease and avoiding the side effects of chemotherapy.

Cons: The major limitation I see of nano-robots is side-effects and risk. Some mal-functioning of the robot inside the blood stream could lead to lethal effects.

Improve LifeStyle:
Another direction is building robots which would do the regular chores of our life like cleaning, laundry, cooking and related activities. An IEEE spectrum article talks about building robots which could be remotely controlled over internet. This would lead to "outsourcing" the robot monitoring work and effectively allow rich countries to import labor -- without the laborer.

Pros: This will help make servants affordable in rich countries and provide more job options in poor countries.

Cons: I think such a robot could make us more lazy instead of improving our quality of life.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Humor@ Google

I love Google's sense of humor. This years April fool plan by Google is trip to Mars.
Imagine the amount of funny statistics google will collect today with this questionnaire.
I remember last year on the April fool day they offered to send hard copies of the email and photos by post for free :D.

Oh, is this Gmail custom time a joke too ?.. It better be.. I was wondering how can google provide such un-ethical services. Though, they did try to make it realistic by only allowing 10 time shifts per year :D.

Well done, Google !! :)