GetRobo Blog English

Restoration Robotics - Robots for Hair Transplantation

 Another tedious and cumbersome job is being taken over by a robot - hair transplantation. Restoration Robotics, a venture backed company in Mountain View, CA,  has developed a robot that can harvest hair follicle units (FUE) from a person's head in a minimally invasive way. The company received FDA clearance and is planning to start selling the robot this summer. The robot solves many of the difficulties that the restoration procedure has had and it may well expand the market for hair transplantation.

 Here is a transcript of the conversation with Mohan Bodduluri, Vice President R&D and one of the founders of Restoration Robotics. It's important to note that the company has an all-star board of directors  and investors - the Who's Who in the field of medical robotics - and that they are also working on a future product that will take care of the hair implant process as well. (This interview was originally conducted for a robotics column on the Wall Street Journal Japan.)

 

Q. How did the company come about? 

A. The idea of using a robot in hair transplantation was originally that of Dr. Phil Gildenberg who is a neurosurgeon from Houston. One day he was having dinner with his young dermatologist nephew who discussed with him how hair transplantation in those days - and even today - was a tedious and difficult procedure. So Dr. Gildenberg says to himself, hey, I’ve stuck a lot of probes into people’s brains using robotics and image guidance, why can’t I put a few follicles in someone’s head? So he wrote a patent application, submitted it to the patent office and then brought the idea to Accuray which was started by a fellow neurosurgeon.

  I happened to be at Accuray at the time as Vice President of R&D, and so he and I met. We thought it was a great idea but Accuray was focused on making its first product CyberKnife successful and starting a brand new product in a totally different field did not make sense. Eventually Accuray became more successful and bigger and then I decided to move on and to start this company. (Photo: Dr. Bodduluri with a prototype robot.)

 Accuray did not invest in our company but because the idea got kicked around there first, we wanted to make sure that there were no issues later. So we made a clear agreement with Accuray and as part of the agreement they became a minor stakeholder in the company.Q. Who are the other 3 co-founders besides yourself? 

A. There’s Dr. Gildenberg who invented the idea. And Don Caddes who was my boss at Accuray at the time, who also served as CEO at Accuray for a while. Before Don and I started looking for money, we were introduced to Dr. Fred Moll who is a serial entrepreneur and medical robotics legend. He is the founder of Intuitive Surgical and other successful medical device companies. He liked the idea and once he said that he will help us raise money, it became very clear that this was going to happen. At that point, Don and I left Accuray and founded the company.

Q. What is the technology behind all this? 

Gentle grippers can handle flaky croissants - Or why Adept bought 2 companies

   Last year we sat down with John Dulchinos, CEO of Adept Technology, to learn about how his company's Quattro robots are revolutionizing the food handling industry. Since then, Adept has acquired 2 companies, InMoTx and MobileRobots, which are aimed to further it's attempt to cultivate new markets for industrial robots.

  We had the chance to talk with John again to get the latest on these strategic acquisitions. (This interview was originally conducted for a robotics column on the Wall Street Journal Japan. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.)  Photo : John holding the InMoTx grippers.   

Q. Why did Adept acquire InMoTx?

A. Last time, we talked about Quattro. Since then, we've done very well and we’ve got some very exciting design wins in that product by major manufacturers to use it to package their products.

 But in the three years we’ve been selling it, the biggest constraint to the robot performance and applications has been the grippers, which is what touches the products. To date, it’s all custom work done by custom integration companies and the solutions aren’t very flexible. They’re not very reliable nor scalable. And it’s created a real limit in applications.

 Adept is focused in primary food handling, which is why we developed our USDA version of our Quattro last year. The challenge with primary food handling is that the product has huge variability. You try to pick up a chicken fillet, and there’s a lot of variability in the shape, the mass, the size and consistency. Moreover, you have to deal with them fast and hygienically. Right now, there are very few machine builders in the world that really understand that market and have the capability to build stuff that can handle products fast and flexible enough to deal with the variability and also meet the regulatory requirements of the industry. InMoTx brings all that technology to us.

Q. Tell us about InMoTx. 

A. InMoTx was founded in 2006 in Denmark and was a customer of ours. They have very innovative grippers and vision technology to identify and handle odd-shaped products and they built some standard cells around Quattro utilizing them. We sold them the robots and they built the solutions to customers, but InMoTx was a little company and they didn't have the resources to capture the real big opportunities.

 Video of InMoTx grippers handling chicken fillets:

 So by combining Adept's worldwide resources and the gripping technology and natural product domain expertise of InMoTx, we can build very neat solutions. And we can do it in a much more integrated fashion than the way traditional robot companies work. We can build very well-integrated software and hardware solutions that optimize the performances of these applications.

 The deal closed in early January and we already have orders together. The InMoTx name will go away, but we’re keeping the OctoMation product line, which will be our platform for natural products handling.  This is focused on handling unwrapped products such as meat, poultry, seafood, fruits, vegetables and dairy. Those are our primary targets. 

Q. Describe the InMoTx gripper (photos below).

 

 

 

PARO Project to authorize robot therapists

 Dr. Takanori Shibata, creator of PARO the therapeutic seal robot, was in San Francisco for a brief visit and GetRobo was able to get an update on the latest of  PARO.

 

 According to Dr. Shibata, Denmark has started to accredit “robot therapists” that are trained and able to use PARO for treating patients with dementia, developmental disabilities and such. This “PARO Project” started last December under the auspices of the Danish Technological Institute and already over 200 robot therapists have been authorized.

 

 Denmark’s spending on health care for patients that suffer dementia is about 100,000 dollars per year which is over twice what Japan spends, according to Dr. Shibata. Denmark believes that PARO can help with the care of these patients and has already announced that that it will purchase 1,000 PAROs for use in hospitals and care facilities. (Photo below: A robot therapist and an elderly woman at a care facility in Denmark. Photo provided by Dr. Shibata.)

 “Every country has its own ways of caring for people and also different ways of funding so it’s very important that we find a way to localize the product and services to fit each market” says Dr. Shibata. Besides Denmark, The Netherlands and Norway have also started a similar accreditation system. Plans in Germany and Spain are also underway.

 

 GetRobo feels that Dr. Shibata and the PARO Project are cultivating an important part of robotics which is to build a social infrastructure for robots to be smoothly integrated into society. There are a number of robots currently under development that are meant to be used in therapeutics and they should all eventually merit from this effort.

 

 PARO is now sold in the U.S. through PARO Robots U.S. It costs 6,000 dollars each. Trials are starting in the U.S. too and here is one recent report on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Pleo Creators Form New Venture

Many readers were sad to see Ugobe – maker of the Pleo dinosaur robot – go, but we have good news today. John Sosoka, former CTO of Ugobe, has started a new company. GetRobo got to talk with John on the phone about his new venture. Also he shared with us some very important experience and insights about why Ugobe failed and the future of the consumer robotics market.

 

(Photo:John with Pleo)

 

Q. What have you been working on lately?

 

A. I have co-founded 2 new companies with Tyler Wilson whom I worked with at my previous ventures including Ugobe. Tyler was the head of software development at Ugobe and the architect and driving force behind the Pleo Development Kit (PDK). By the way, the PDK has just been released as an alpha by Innvo Labs, a part of Jetta (that bought Ugobe’s intellectual property). Tyler and I are very happy that all the effort that we put into the PDK will now open up the creative possibilities for Pleo fans.

 

 So, one company we started is called Vita Robotica, which was formed when I got stopped being paid by Ugobe. While I was working without getting paid to try to deal with all the issues of Ugobe, I started working on a completely new implementation of a brain for robots that interact with humans. It’s something that I really had hoped to do at Ugobe, but never got to.

 

 I am fascinated in this life-in-robotics thing. And what I’m currently most interested in is in developing robots for special needs such as medical applications and companionship in institutions. For example, there are so many interesting things that have come up in the use of therapy dogs, and I think there are a lot of areas where medications don’t work well and where you can make use of robotics. Automated diagnostics at home is another area. Companion robots could help people keep track of their health everyday so that they can identify problems before they become real problems. There are not enough products that address those areas, and I think the market is pretty wide open.

 

 So Vita Robotica is a research company that builds the platform and tools that could be used to develop robots in this area.

Robot of the Year 2007 - 3

Three more special prizes for the 2007 Robot of the Year. Best component was the ultra-small AC servo actuator RSF-3B made by Harmonic Drive Systems, Inc. Fit for robot hands as in the video below.

Japan's machinery association chose the Automatic Robotic Blood Sample Courier System made by  Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. to award its prize. Two key features of this system is that the robots can work in groups without predesignated tracks.

Last but not least, an MR Image-Guided Surgical Robotic System developed by a group of academia and companies and led by Prof. Makoto Hashizume of the Dept. of Advanced Medical Initiatives at Kyushu University, received the jury's special award. What is so cool about this surgical robot is that it is compact enough to fit inside an MRI scanner and that all the electronic/mechanic parts needed to manipulate the robot and that would normally interfere with the MRI are OUTSIDE of the scanner. Thus for the first time, the robot enables doctors to conduct surgery utilizing MR images at real time. Something the popular da Vinci surgical system is not capable of doing.