In factories and warehouses, robots routinely outdo humans in strength and precision. Artificial intelligence software can drive cars, beat grandmasters at chess and leave Jeopardy! champions in the dust.

But machines still lack a critical element that will keep them from eclipsing most human capabilities anytime soon: a well-developed sense of touch.

Consider Dr. Nikolas Blevins, a head and neck surgeon at Stanford Health Care who routinely performs ear operations requiring that he shave away bone deftly enough to leave an inner surface as thin as the membrane in an eggshell.

Blevins is collaborating with roboticists J. Kenneth Salisbury and Sonny Chan on designing software that will make it possible to rehearse these operations before performing them. The program blends X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging data to create a vivid three-dimensional model of the inner ear, allowing the surgeon to practice drilling away bone, to take a visual tour of the patients skull and to virtually feel subtle differences in cartilage, bone and soft tissue. Yet no matter how thorough or refined, the software provides only the roughest approximation of Blevins sensitive touch.

Being able to do virtual surgery, you really need to have haptics, he said, referring to the technology that makes it possible to mimic the sensations of touch in a computer simulation.

The softwares limitations typify those of robotics, in which researchers lag in designing machines to perform tasks that humans routinely do instinctively. Since the first robotic arm was designed at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1960s, robots have learned to perform repetitive factory work, but they can barely open a door, pick themselves up if they fall, pull a coin out of a pocket or twirl a pencil.

The correlation between highly evolved artificial intelligence and physical ineptness even has a name: Moravecs paradox, after robotics pioneer Hans Moravec, who wrote in 1988, It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a 1-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.

Advances in haptics and kinematics, the study of motion control in jointed bodies, are essential if robots are ever to collaborate with humans in hoped-for roles like food service worker, medical orderly, office secretary and health care assistant.

It just takes time, and its more complicated, Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at the University of California, Berkeley, said of such advances. Humans are really good at this, and they have millions of years of evolution.

Touch impulses

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