It’s always been hoped that advancements in robotics could one day make a difference to how we live our lives and with this in mind we were delighted to see a pair of robots unveiled this week that can perform two vital functions in today’s society – major surgery and fetching beer.

Some of the concept work for the PR2 Robot which can fetch your favourite beer.

First up the surgery-bots, and research at Duke University in North Carolina has shown that a robot can locate and operate on a human organ and even take samples – all without a surgeon’s intervention. A robotic arm combined with ultrasound was used to carry out test procedures on a section of raw turkey breast.

Turkey is often used in medical research because its texture is similar to human flesh and it scans in a similar way during ultrasound. The robot used ultrasound to scan the tissue and locate the section that needed to be removed, reported the Daily Mail.

It was then able to take real-time 3D information and give the robot specific commands to perform. After which, the robot arm then manipulated the same biopsy device used by human surgeons to reach a section of tissue and take samples.

Now, the robot guided a ‘plunger’ to eight different locations on the simulated prostate tissue in 93% of its attempts so we can’t get that excited just yet. I don’t think anyone would want to wake up and hear their surgeon say ‘well we got 93% of the operation spot on… and you didn’t use that arm much anyway’. Still though, nice work.

But Professor Stephen Smith, who led the team, believes that routine medical procedures will be performed in the future with minimal human guidance. He said it will be more convenient and cost far less than using human surgeons.

Professor Smith said: “We’re now testing the robot on a human mannequin seated at the examining table whose breast is constrained in a stiff bra cup. The breast is composed of turkey breast tissue with an embedded grape to simulate a lesion. Our next step is to move to an excised human breast.”

On the beer-getting-bot, well that comes from a company called Willow Garage who aim “to lay the groundwork for the use of personal robotics applications in everyday life”. And here’s their latest offering in action.

My favourite feature… the ‘Beer Me’ button. Nicely done.