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i work at one of the top three Tech schools in the world.
Did you know robots can run now?
and then there was this from the Washington Post:
Neuroscientist Make Progress With Brain-Machine Interfaces
Scientists in North Carolina have built a brain implant that lets monkeys control a robotic arm with their thoughts, marking the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object. The technology could someday allow people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others today do with their hands. It might even allow some paralyzed people to move their own arms or legs again, by transmitting the brain's directions not to a machine but directly to the muscles in those latent limbs. The brain implants could also allow scientists or soldiers to control, hands-free, small robots that could perform tasks in inhospitable environments or in war zones. In the new experiments, monkeys with wires running from their brains to a robotic arm were able to use their thoughts to make the arm perform tasks. But before long, the scientists said, they will upgrade the implants so the monkeys can transmit their mental commands to machines wirelessly.
The experiment by some may be viewed as cruel but merit and implications of the task are huge.
The device relies on tiny electrodes, each one resembling a wire thinner than a human hair. After removing patches of skull from two monkeys to expose the outer surface of their brains, Nicolelis and his colleagues stuck 96 of those tiny wires about a millimeter deep in one monkey's brain and 320 of them in the other animal's brain. The surgeries were painstaking, taking about 10 hours, and ended with the pouring of a substance like dental cement over the area to substitute for the missing bits of skull. The monkeys were unaffected by the surgery, Nicolelis said. But now they had tufts of wires protruding from their heads, which could be hooked up to other wires that ran through a computer and on to a large mechanical arm.
After this, the monkeys learned how to move the robotic arm with a joystick. While they were using the joystick a computer was monitoring their thought patterns. Eventually the computer learned to read the thoughts of the monkeys.
At first, Nicolelis said, the monkey kept moving the joystick, not realizing that her own brain was now solely in charge of the arm's movements. Then, he said, an amazing thing happened. "We're looking, and she stops moving her arm," he said, "but the cursor keeps playing the game and the robot arm is moving around." The animal was controlling the robot with its thoughts. "We couldn't speak. It was dead silence," Nicolelis said. "No one wanted to verbalize what was happening. And she continued to do that for almost an hour." At first, the animals' performance declined compared to the sessions on the joystick. But after just a day or so, the control was so smooth it seemed the animals had accepted the mechanical arm as their own.
the founding scientist John P. Donoghue and Miguel A.L. Nicolelis have petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in hopes of starting experiments on humans next year. At that time, they hope to have a device that could be implanted into the brain that will allow the brain signals to be transmitted, bypassing the need for external wires. I look forward to the day that a hat or helmet can be the signal catcher. Think of the things we would be able to do effortlessly. Operate your computer, mental telepathy (communicate with others without talking), drive a car, control objects in the house, and on and on. This will be really beneficial to those handicapped in ways that limit their physical mobility, but eventually this technology will become common place. SOurce: Washington Post
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