Ants Used For Mind-Controlled Robotic Limbs 82
mr sanjeev writes "Australian researchers are reducing the divide between science fiction and science reality by bringing the development of mind-controlled robotic limbs a few steps closer. Even the most fertile science fiction imagination might not see a link between the behavior of ant colonies and the development of lifelike robotic limbs, but that is the straightforward mathematical reality of research underway at the University of Technology, Sydney. The technology mimics the myoelectric signals used by the central nervous system (CNS) to control muscle activity. Artificial intelligence researchers have long used the complex interactions between ants to construct a pattern recognition formula to identify bioelectric signals. PhD student Rami Khushaba said 'swarm-intelligence' allows scientists to understand the body's electrical signals and use the knowledge to create a robotic prosthetic device that can be operated by human thought."
Team make robot with grown rat brains (Score:4, Interesting)
http://inttech.blogspot.com/2008/11/sci-fi-and-real-science-collide.html [blogspot.com]
Yes real science and Sci-Fi are colliding. This research can have amazing benefits for people suffering from a wide range of conditions and limb loss.
we're making progress (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm looking forward to the day when I can crush someone's throat with the power of my evil bionic hand. Until then, I'll just have to choke them by roasting habanero peppers in a dry skillet.
I wonder how long it'll take for artificial limbs to become perfect substitutes, the kind of thing you can even forget you have. My glasses are so much a part of me and so light, I could easily forget I'm wearing them aside from the bit about things not being blurry. I wonder what it would take for an artificial hand to be good enough to play piano, type on a keyboard, providing perfect sensory feedback and accuracy.
What's the hard part about wiring the limbs up to the nerves? I remember reading about a special adhesive developed that could be sticky on one end for nerves, a proper digital interface on the other side, and the signals would be transmitted properly.
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree completely. Trying to calibrate to the specific signals from the human brain is solving the wrong problem. The most awesome capability that our brains have is the ability to adapt. Spend more time on processing the signals in the arm-end for execution, and in sending tactile feedback signals back. It might be nearly impossible for a person to use for a while, but once the brain figures it out and starts rerouting itself, it will seem perfectly natural.
An analogy: if you have a car, and you're trying to build a better road, you should focus on improving the surface of the road, not on a mechanism that reaches up to help push the car along. The "move the car" problem is sufficiently solved that your efforts will probably just get in the way.
-t.
less than 256 milliseconds? (Score:2, Interesting)
Picking the right signals from the brain (Score:2, Interesting)
Just had a thought: It must be difficult to program the artificial limb to respond to the correct signals. If you told me to flex a specific muscle, I'd actually have a pretty hard time isolating it and doing it. If I no longer had the muscle in question, it would be even harder. It makes me wonder, is that really how the nervous system works? Maybe we don't have a 'wire' from the brain to each muscle, we instead have a set of motions that we perform, each involving several muscles. Our brains can decide between those sets, and can use combinations of the sets to 'tweak' the movement. If the brain finds that a motion is impossible given the current set, it can work on evolving a new set, but that process would only be possible with a fairly involved training process, a reroute of the neural pathways.
What if you told people to go through a set of motions that involved other muscles as well, and used the intersections of the signals and muscles involved to isolate the correct signals? Maybe the story in the past couple days about replicating the Mona Lisa using polygons is a good analogy. The goal is to find a minimal set of signals (polygons) that form a basis for complete functionality.
-t.
Re:I for one... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Meh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Bah. Your comment is old and outdated, except in the general sense.
Yes, it is not as easy for older people to learn (rewire). That doesn't mean it is impossible, or even *that hard*.
We also used to think that the body never grew any new brain cells. Now we know that's incorrect, too.
The adult human brain is much more plastic than your comment seems to imply.