(AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye)

With robots disguised as cute baby seals and "huggable" teddy bears, this was bound to happen. Stumbling upon these adorable pictures the other day reminded me of an interesting article I read on msnbc.com a few months back.

Whether intentionally designed to do so (again, did I mention the ridiculously cute robots pictured above? I WANT ONE!), robots are inspiring human emotional attachment. A study, conducted at Georgia Tech's College of Computing, reported some interesting behaviors from Roomba owners.

Some of owners simply started by naming their Roomba. Ok. I've named my car before too. Nothing to be concerned about.

But then some started traveling with their Roombas. Hmmm. A getaway trip to Tahiti. How romantic. Perhaps they assumed the hotel room would need routine cleaning.

And then others dressed up their Roombas in costumes. A sexy maid costume perhaps? Uh oh. (Seriously,a website sells costumes for your Roomba, one called "La French Maid")

So then can we really be surprised when one guy introduced his robot to his parents?

"Mom, Dad, I'd like to introduce you to the love of my life, Rudy... my Roomba robot."

I'm not really quite sure how to grasp the consequences of loving your robot yet. For the Roomba owners, they permitted more human-like behavoirs. For instance, they accepted manufacruting failures as simple imperfections; if the Roomba still ran, there was no need to send it back to replace its motor. And they also started attempting to "please" the Roomba, by pre-cleaning floors and buying furniture that had adequeate elevation for the Roomba to roam around underneath. This isn't quite the "robot slave to clean human floors" scenario we were expecting.

Let's flip this around. Here's an instance where a robot programmed to love goes too far. A robot research lab in Japan created a humanoid robot, Kenji, capable of demonstrating love by hugging or embracing a human-sized doll. Sometimes, the embrace would last for hours and the when the doll was not present, the robot was make inquiries as to when the doll would return. But here's what researchers didn't expect:

"What they didn’t count on were the effects of several months of self-iteration within the complex machine-learning code which gave Kenji his initial tenderness. As of last week, Kenji’s love for the doll, and indeed anybody he sets his ‘eyes’ on, is so intense that Dr. Takahashi and his team now fear to show him to outsiders. The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji."

Oops. Sorry Kenji, she's just not that into you.

St. Joseph's Health System in Atlanta, GA, just announced it's launching a non-profit training program called the International College of Robotic Surgery (ICRS) to train robotic surgical teams from around the world. The program features robust training on "all daVinci Surgical System robotic surgery specialties, beginning with intraccardiac and cardia revascularization, including TECAB."

The daVinci Robot, for those who may be unfamiliar, is a highly-complex system of high-precisision manipulators that perform surgical tasks (i.e. cutting tissue, tying sutures, sewing stiches) inside your body. In the meantime, these slave manipulators are being controlled by a surgeon sitting 5 feet away from the patient at a master console.

Why is the daVinci Robot so cool?

First off, laproscopic (non-invasive) surgery is the way to go these days. Rather than splitting a dude open like a watermelon, a couple of small incisions can be made (the size of a dime) where several tiny end-effectors are inserted to perform surgical tasks. This is safer, cleaner, and alleviates a tremendous amount of trauma and recovery-time for the patient. Here's what I mean:

Let's say two 8-year-old boys are playing around with their new BB guns (they are sure they will not shoot their eye's out). However, one boy accidentally shoots his best friend in the chest and the BB has entered his chest cavity. Now, the kid isn't going to just drop dead right there; he's probably still conscious and can even walk around. But the BB certainly must be removed.

Before the daVinci robot, an anesthesiologist would have to put the kid under. Then, a surgeon would have to make an incision at the top of the child's torso all the way down to below his navel. He would have to pry open the rib cage, remove the foreign material, and fuse the kid back up. The 8-year old kid now has to spend 2 weeks in the hosiptial, doped with pain killers, under supervision to make sure he is not at risk of infection. It will be 5 months before he can run around the backyard again. He's got a wicked scar that will stick around for the rest of his life. All because of a stupid little BB.

Let's replay the same scenario, with the daVinci robot:

The boy is put-under by the anesthesiologist and the daVinci robot is wheeled in (you have to wait until the patient is completely out before you wheel it in; can you imagine trying to fall asleep with 15 robotic arms hovering over you?). Four small incisions are made and the surgeon uses a tiny fiber optic camera at the tip of one of the end effectors to locate position of the BB. The feed from the camera is being broadcasted into the large operating console, where the surgeon sits, as though he is watching a nickelodeon. His hands (and feet) are guiding and commanding the position of the daVinci robot manipulators, using a series of knobs, buttons, pedals and levers.

He selects a different manipulator, one with tiny pinchers at the tip. He guides this one in, grasps the BB and pulls it out. The four tiny incisions are patched up. The young boy leaves the hosptial the next day. There is little, to no scarring. He is running around and climbing trees again within a week.

I don't mean to get sappy, but it's just plain cool. These robots are performing all sorts of operations. Coronary bypasses, hysterectomies, patching up kidneys and bladders... My dad will most likely meet the daVinci robot when it removes cancerous tissue from his prostate (I love you, Dad).

So I'm psyched to see that robotic surgery is becoming more pervasive and that surgeons from around the world will travel to robotic-surgery-capitals like Atlanta and Houston to train on the daVinci robot. The daVinci robot is one of my favorite robot friends.

Awhile back, I learned about the 3 D's of Robotics from Dr. Al Wicks, Director of Virginia Tech's Modal Analysis Laboratory (MAL) and golf-dynamics-extrodinaire. He said that a robot's purpose was to do things that were either Dull, Dirty or Dangerous to humans. Meaning, if it's boring, gross or puts a human's life on the line, that's typically when a robot is designed to take care of business.

This makes sense.

• We have robots that harvest our fields (this is Dull... sorry farmers)
• We have robots that vaccuum our floors (this is Dirty... at least in my apartment, it's dirty)
• And we have hexapod life-saving robots that crawl into harsh environments to support critical, life-saving rescue missions (this is Dangerous... and incredibly cool)

So I scratched my head when I read that Taiwan University has cast robots as leads in their production of The Phantom of the Opera. "The lead bots (named Thomas and Janet) can both walk, and have silicon facial "muscles" that help them mimic human expressions and mouth movements." Whoa.

I'm struggling to think which one of the 3 D's these robots should fall under.

Photo from switched.com

Did I mention that NI's cofounder, Technical Fellow, and Father of LabVIEW, Jeff Kodosky, loves opera? I wonder if he might be interested in seeing this production...

Recently, I was at this year's RoboDevelopement Conference and Expo, a cool robotics conference where a bunch of robot designers get together and share the latest and greatest in the robotics industry. While I didn't get to meet my favorite robot, WALL-E, I did get to meet some pretty cool dudes from UC Berkeley.

First, meet Rubix Cube Man: Dan Dzoan

OK, so once Anu reloaded my Flip camera with some fresh batteries, I was introduced to CuBear 2.0, Berkeley's Rubix Cube solving robot (programmed with NI LabVIEW, sweet!).

Then, the epic battle began.

It was Man vs. Machine. Who would solve the rubix cube the fastest?

I didn't do that great of a job of getting some good footage of the robot by itself. But luckily, the Berkeley guys have it covered. Here's more detail on how the robot actually works: