Robots to wear
By Scott Kirsner
"We put people in robots."
That isn't the official slogan of Yobotics, a South Boston company spun off from one of MIT's best-known robotics labs, but it might as well be. It's a phrase that captures the most promising new direction in robotics. Forget about C-3PO and Rosie the Robot Maid. Some of your best friends will be part-robot, surviving thanks to devices like the Abiomed artificial heart -- essentially an implantable robotic pump -- or wearing robotic braces like those being developed by Yobotics to assist them in walking and climbing stairs.
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The phrase is also what garnered Yobotics its first quarter-million in funding. When Chris Morse, one of the company's four founders, told tech entrepreneur Phil Carvey that the start-up's chief goal was to put people in robots, Carvey opened his wallet and created a charitable organization called Powered Prosthetics to help fund Yobotics's research into locomotion-assisting bots.
Carvey is a post-polio victim who had come into a small fortune when a networking firm he helped start, Avici Systems, went public last year. Though Carvey, at 59, is physically active and doesn't use braces or crutches to get around, he worries about what will happen as he ages and suffers the loss in nerve tissue that typically plagues those with post-polio syndrome.
Several years ago, he decided to start investigating whether any robotics researchers were working on devices that would assist those with weakness in their lower-extremities. "Growing old ain't for sissies," Carvey says. "One is seeing one's limitations." His search led him to Yobotics.
All of Yobotics's founders are in their 20s, and have done research at MIT's renowned Leg Lab. The first prototype that Yobotics has created is a knee-bot. Its purpose is to augment the strength of an individual's knee in walking, climbing stairs, and doing deep-knee bends.
In a recent demonstration, one of the Yobotics founders, Jerry Pratt, straps a black knee brace to his right leg. He's already wearing a blue bicycling sneaker on his right foot, jury-rigged with sensors that tell a computer how much weight is resting on the heel and toe of that foot, which in turn lets the knee-bot know how much force it should exert as it extends or retracts. A large piston is positioned behind Pratt's thigh, parallel to his femur. This is the "series elastic actuator," a conglomeration of motors, springs, and threaded shafts, developed at MIT, that mimics the natural and fluid motions of human muscles.
"The main reason for making this," Pratt explains, standing at the bottom of a small mock-up of a staircase in the company's spartan office, "was to prove we could do something super-human. I can do these" -- Pratt starts doing deep-knee bends using just his right leg -- "all day. With two of these knees, you'd be able to hike up mountains, or climb stairs, as long as your batteries hold out. We've done something super-human."
Pratt says the sensation of wearing the robo-knee is like being in zero-gravity. He tells his leg to move, but then the actuator kicks in, and he doesn't have to expend any effort going up the wooden staircase.
"You get used to it quickly," Pratt says. "There's no interface -- it's an extension of your body. When you take it off, it feels like someone just cranked up gravity."
The initial prototype has several limitations. Since the actuator is located behind the wearer's thigh, it's impossible to sit down. The leg currently runs off power from a wall outlet, and Ben Krupp, another of the company's founders, says that even the best lithium ion battery would only power it for an hour or so. The control system for the robo-knee, which reads information from the device, processes it through a sophisticated algorithm, then tells the knee when, and how much, to push, is arrayed across a folding table, and the wearer is tethered to it.
But the Yobotics team has ideas about how they'll surmount all those problems, and they're planning to build, by the end of this year, a prototype of a device that supports the motion of the hip, knee, and ankle. "That would help you walk straight longer, faster, and more efficiently," says Krupp, who is clad in shorts and a T-shirt, as are the other three founders.
Which gets them thinking about the Boston Marathon. Ideally, Yobotics hopes the devices they're developing will be used not only by people with handicaps, but to enhance the performance of the able-bodied. Imagine how much more ground a postman would be able to cover if he had to use almost no energy to walk or climb stairs.
Carvey, Yobotics's benefactor, agrees: "It's important to be able to make a case that lots of people who are able-bodied could use this." Yobotics's founders project a $20,000 introductory price. But the bigger the eventual market is, beyond just the disabled, the cheaper the devices would be when mass-produced.
So the crew at Yobotics is musing about a classic MIT-style "hack," or prank, to generate publicity: enter a robotically-augmented human in the Boston Marathon. A spokesperson for the Boston Athletic Association, which organizes the annual marathon, said runners with robo-parts would be prohibited from the race's open field, but might be able to race in the "physically-impaired" category, which allows the use of braces, prosthetics, and similar devices.
Whether or not a robo-runner crosses the finish line in Copley Square next April, or the year after, Yobotics's products will eventually make for some great debates on sports talk radio. If Casey Martin can use a golf cart to play in the PGA, should a football player who suffers from a similar disease be able to use a robotic brace to return kick-offs in the NFL? Or, if a shot of cortisone is acceptable to get a player with a sprained ankle back on the field, what about allowing that player to use a robo-ankle for the rest of the game?
The Department of Defense doesn't worry about such delicate questions; it's already allocating $50 million for research into a robotic exoskeleton that would increase the speed and endurance of foot soldiers on the battlefield. Though Yobotics wasn't included in the initial DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grant, Pratt is heading to Washington this week to show Yobotics's prototype to the program manager overseeing the distribution of robotics money.
Hooking onto the government gravy train is crucial to Yobotics, since it will have spent most of the $250,000 it's received from Carvey's Powered Prosthetics organization by the end of this year. (The founders have been exceptionally frugal, buying used office furniture from MIT and renting inexpensive space on L Street, but the parts for their prototypes are pricey.) And it's unlikely Carvey will be able to supply more money in the short term because Avici's stock, which once hit $174, is now trading at about $4. "The wherewithal I have to continue their funding is a bit diminished, to say the least," he says.
Yobotics's founders, however, are confident they'll be able to continue their work. The objective is to build a fully-functional prototype and then get acquired by a medical devices company, since Yobotics doesn't have the resources to take a product through the requisite FDA trial. Getting to that point will require winning some government grants, attracting more outside funding, or supporting themselves through consulting gigs, a few of which they've done already.
"It is certainly possible that one can fail in this quest to build such assistive devices," Carvey writes in an e-mail, "but it seems better to try rather than simply hoping that someone else will create them."
Krupp and his cohorts explain that their company's curious name originated at MIT's Leg Lab where, when a complicated prototype worked perfectly, someone was likely to call out, "Yo, that's great!" So Yobotics, by name, is oriented to achievement, and breaking through difficult barriers.
"It's important for us to steer our own course and work on the stuff we love to work on and are passionate about," says Krupp. "This will pay off some day."
By that time, "We put people in robots" could be as familiar a slogan as "Built Ford Tough" or "Have a Coke and a smile."
Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.