10 . Dr. De Momi, of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy), led an international team that trained a robot to imitate natural human actions.     1     Over time this should lead to improvements in safety during surgeries because unlike their human partners, robots do not tire and can complete an endless series of precise(精准的) movements. The goal is not to remove human skill from the operating room, but to complement it with a robot's particular skills and benefits.

“As a roboticist, I firmly believe that robotic (co)workers, or say, collaborators will definitely change the work market, but they won’t steal job opportunities.     2     ”De Momi explains.

To conduct their experiment De Momi’s team photographed a human being doing numerous reaching motions, in a way similar to handing instruments (手术工具) to a surgeon. These camera captures were input into the neural (神经) network of the robotic arm, which is essential to controlling movements. Next, a human operator guided the robotic arm in imitating the reaching motions that the human subject had initially performed. Although there was not a perfect match between the robotic and human actions, they were generally similar.

    3     These observers determined whether the actions of the robotic arms were “biologically inspired,” which meant that their neural networks had effectively learned to imitate human behavior. About 70% of the time this is exactly what the human observers concluded.

These results are promising, although further research is necessary to confirm or refine De Momi’s conclusions. If robotic arms can indeed imitate human behavior, it would be necessary to build conditions in which humans and robots can cooperate effectively in high stress environments like operating rooms.     4     De Momi’s work is part of the growing field of healthcare robotics, which has the potential to change the way we receive health care sooner rather than later.