Media Alert
High School Teams Will Build Robotic Arms to 'Operate' by Remote Control Johns Hopkins Engineering Students will Supervise the Event WHEN: 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 18. WHERE: The Great Hall, located inside Levering Hall, The Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md. WHAT: Students from 12 Baltimore area public high schools will learn about tele-medicine, in which a doctor in one location supervises robotic surgery on a patient many miles away. In the Johns Hopkins event, each school's team of three students will receive two $200 Lego Mindstorm kits to build a robotic arm that can manipulate a surgical instrument. Then, a video camera will be trained on the student "surgeon." A computer connected to the camera will translate the surgeon's body movements into commands that move the robotic arm in the same way. Each robotic arm will be scored according to how well it follows the surgeon's moves and how accurately it touches a target, representing the patient. While building and programming these robots over a four-day period, the teams will be guided by Johns Hopkins University undergraduates and graduate students affiliated with the Engineering Research Center in Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology. The finished devices will be tested on Sunday afternoon. The event is funded by a National Science Foundation grant. PARTICIPATING HIGH SCHOOLS: Carver Center, Catonsville, Baltimore City College, Eastern Technical, Forest Park, Loch Raven, Parkville, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Southern, Southwestern, Woodlawn and Wootton. JOHNS HOPKINS CONTEST COORDINATORS: Ian Donn and Oleg Gerovichev, Johns Hopkins engineering graduate students, will be available for interviews Sunday afternoon.
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