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Controlling Robots with the Mind
loucura! writes "Scientific American has a fairly technical article on the real-time control of robotic limbs using recorded neuron patterns. The researcher's macaque has simultaneously controlled two robotic arms in addition to its own arm motion. The amazing thing? One of the arms was 600 miles away. So, they transmitted and translated the "commands" into motion in less than 300 milliseconds!" It's still a long ways off from helping the disabled or making a Dr. Octopus suit, but the potential uses are pretty cool.
Just like in Forbidden Planet. We can try out our subconcious minds controlling these robots!
Soon a bunch of HPB Counter-Strike addicts will be wired into computers, Matrix-style, and will be commanding T800 robots into 21st century urban combat in the middle east!
Can't these people see the potential for robotic genitalia? :-)
Add some good feedback and you could be boning your g.f while you're 600 miles away!
I read this on Robots.net 12 days ago. /.?
/. critisizing)
Little slow
(-1
This
Sure it would be neat and all to have artificial limbs or a bad ass set of robotic armor, and it would be even cooler to have a Matrix style, jack into your computer interface, but for now i would be happy for something that lets me move my laptop pointer around the screen better than this morphodite little nipple thing above my "B" key.
No, the amazing thing was that they successfully decoded the neural impulses of the monkey's motor cortex and generated commands that drove a robotic arm in sync with the monkey's arm.
Who gives a shit if they also sent those signals 600 miles away? Let me introduce you to something called the Internet...
I don't understand the fascination with the 600 mile separation. The people who need to control things directly with their neurons are going to be much more interested in manipulating their immediate environment. Anyway, these days aren't the next room and 600 miles pretty much equivalent?
Two things in this study did strike me as amazing though. One is that the connection has lasted a year. I remember when they first started this the neural connection didn't last long. The other is the fact that the monkey took only a few days to figure out that she didn't have to use her hand and just had to think about moving the lever.
"He's more machine now than man. Twisted and evil."--Obi-Wan Kenobi
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Finally, I'll be able to type and browse with BOTH hands!
Wow, 600 hundred miles, that is 100 times more amazing than 6 miles away!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Well, eventually we'll cover every science fiction and convert them to science fact. This one strongly brings to mind The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton by Larry Niven.
Bonus reading: Artificial Arm stories
Let's stop thinking small. Bring on the Lensman!
[obscure Mr. Show reference].
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
Can I name my robot Arnold? T1000 maybe?
"Robots Controlling The Mind"
Just wait and see
If Battlemechs(TM) will be much farther off...
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
At the current time, all they are doing with the robot arms is ape-ing (pun intended) the motion of the monkey's arm - the monkey is NOT using the robot arms to accomplish tasks. Rather, as the monkey uses it own arm to accomplish tasks, the robot arms are making the same motions. The monkey is no more "controlling" two arms in addition to her own than I would be controlling two computers just because I had VNC displaying the same thing on both computers.
In other experiments the researchers HAVE closed the loop, by using the brain activity to control a cursor on a screen the monkey can see. Thus, the control loop is closed: Screen feeds brain feeds computer feeds screen.
But until they can close the loop controlling the arm, by providing some form of tactile feedback, the system isn't very useful. That is their next step - closing the loop by stimulating the monkey's skin in proportion to the force the arm is experiencing.
Now, if they can combine this research with the work being done on rats to stimulate the sensation nerves, then they may have something that can help paraplegics. And given how plastic the brain is - how good the brain is at adapting to its feedback, then there is a good chance we might be able to make useful direct brain controlled limbs.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Christopher Reeve can already move his fingers!
Well, obviously this experiment proves that links between computers and brain tissue are quite possible and usable. In addition, it beats the pants off other experiments...like that one the air force had where human volunteers would try to move a simulator left and right. It took weeks of training for the humans to "train" their brains to give the correct signal most of the time.
In this case no training seems to be required...you just move your arm and the software is able to translate that. VERY IMPRESSIVE.
But there is a price to be paid : the monkey is wired with actual hardware in the brain. Face it, the V.R. systems of the future and the cyborgs will have to have actual surgically inserted wiring. To get that cool V.R. rig you'll have to have a major operation installing thousands of tiny wires to the nerves of your body.
I actually read that intro as:
It's still a long ways off from helping the disabled by making a Dr. Octopus suit
You shoulda seen what I was imagining...
Towards the end of the article they talk about being able to replace a monkey's arm with a robotic one (by aanesthetizing the monkey's arm) and having it control the robot arm as if it were its own.
If this does prove to be successful, It could open the door to 'human upgrades' where you could buy mods for yourself, like extra limbs. i could see a huge market for this in construction. Though i know there are alot of other field that would benefit from this, but i wont list them all.
Sun is Warm, Grass is Green
This sounds like a wonderful advance in science for those who are physically impaired/handicapped.
"to control mechanical and electronic machines purely by "thinking through," or imagining, the motions."
But what happens when someone wants to think through actions before performing them? Will the robotic limb strike before the time is right, simply because the person is thinking about possibly going about something a certain way?
On a lighter note, I can just see the new filth ads now: "Buy a mechanical penis! You'll have complete control over it's every movement! Don't ejaculate until you want to!"
Controlling robots with the mind? Pfft! I can levitate birds...
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Last night, I was sitting on the sofa watching the game, and I glanced over and saw this headline on the front of the magazine, and something about wondercars, and another fluffy sensationalist barely scientific come-on.
And I thought it was the latest issue of Popular Science, which it turned out was was right underneath this issue of Scientific American.
Seriously. If you covered up the name, and don't have the UPC memorized, you couldn't hope to tell them apart. They used the same layout template for the covers. And maybe for their websites, because both covers are in about the same spot on their home page:
exhibit A.
exhibit B.
Scientific American should never have started taking ads.
--Blair
More persistent-looking links to the cover thumbnails:
sa
ps
She found that she could change the channels of a TV just by blinking her eyes. That or she is a scientologist throwing a postulate at the problem.
They later turned off the joystick and the monkey leared that she could sit back and think the action and make it happen.. she stopped moving her arm.
Maybe an extra pair of synchronized arms would have some *ahem* applications
Reads like a hype article for the researchers who wrote it. At the end it says:
"In the two years since that day, our labs and several others have advanced neuroscience, computer science, micr..."
this was done 2 years ago, guys. it's old news.
wake up, johnny, i feel a hurricane comin' on!
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
It'd really be much cooler if the monkey controlled the robots with it's mind, and was in turn controlled by me, through marionette strings. It's beyond science; it's art.
Seriously, though, doesn't this raise the very real potential problem of armies of robots, mechanically flinging monkey poo?
And imagine a beow . . . Oh, never mind. I'll shut up now.
The only thing original about this article is that the robot is controlled over the internet. Dr. Andrew Schwartz and his collaborators at Arizona State have been doing this type of research longer and much more successfully. It was Schwartz and Georgopoulos who first deciphered the encoding of the motor cortex. It was Schwartz who first controlled a robot using motor cortical signals from a monkey with a free moving arm. Now Nicolelis and his collaborators are taking credit. Its shocking Nicolelis is so unpopular among his peers in the neuroscience community.
Georgopoulos, A., Schwartz, A., & Kettner, R. (1986). Neuronal population vector coding of movement direction. Science, 233, 1416-19.
Georgopoulos, A, Lurito, J., Petrides, M., Schwartz, A., & Massey, J. (1989). Mental rotation of the neuronal population vector. Science, 243, 234-236.
Dawn M. Taylor, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, and Andrew B. Schwartz (2002). Direct Cortical Control of 3D Neuroprosthetic Devices. Science, 296: 1829-1832.
Maybe someone else saw the recent issue of Wired magazine (maybe a month or two back) where some mad scientist-type was able to wire a camera up to a blind patients brain, and through the use of a program that would 'learn' what effects certain signals it would put out on the guys visual cortex had, could then begin to replicate a pretty decent field of vision (albeit at very low resolution).
Well, it seems that scientists are getting somewhat proficient at interpreting brain signals and even providing direct-to-brain feedback. The reality of this is actually amazing. It's the stuff of science fiction, but immersive systems (the Matrix, anyone?) might not be so far fetched anymore. The stuff from 80's cyberpunk fiction where everyone is walking around with jacks in their heads might not be so far off. But then again, flying cars shouldn't be so far off either but you don't see many of those either.
From the article: In the two years since that day,...
The incident in question happened two years ago - I guess I'm not the only one who submits articles here only to see them "pending" for a long time. But I'm not bitter.
I'd rather it was "Controlling the Mind with Robots".
Damn. This is harder than it seems.
wtf is going on!
All the posts are unnested and I can mod things, I just want nested comments!
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
To me, the most amazing part of the article is on page 5:
If visual and tactile sensations mimic the information that usually flows between Aurora's own arm and brain, long-term interaction with a BMI could possibly stimulate her brain to incorporate the robot into its representations of her body--schema known to exist in most brain regions. In other words, Aurora's brain might represent this artificial device as another part of her body. Neuronal tissue in her brain might even dedicate itself to operating the robot arm and interpreting its feedback.
So, not only could you teach your brain to replace a damaged limb with a prosthetic one, but you could potentially teach your brain to operate a totally *new* limb! How cool would that be??
And the whole idea of remotely controlling limbs makes me think that the concept of Hector from Saturn 3 [www.imdb.com] probably seemed far-fetched at the time, but starts to be less and less so...
Have EVDO, will travel.
The data is not as clean as the article implies (typical of Scientific American and science p.r. pulp magazines) and the technology right now will detect only gross patterns, some identical patterns are generated by other intensions and attensions so we have big problems of false positives and of course some give no distinguishing patterns at all. There is the big question whether brain patterns will correlate 100% or even good enough with mental patterns (specificity issues), the literature isn't very good in this regard. I seriously doubt 100% correlation for logical, empirical and ontological reasons, but good enough maybe all that's required.
If you put a disabled person into an high resolution NMR you can let him control robotics devices so that he can walk around.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Daimos, or Gundam. ;)
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
Why does nobody talk about permanently implanting things onto the body to make normal people much better? That way, the better people can kill everyone else and everybody will be evolved then. It'll happen, it's called evolution.
... to get me to stop wearing my brainwave deflecting hat! Sinister indeed...
rooooar
...a beowulf cluster of these! Seriously. Whoever had such a thing would make a lot of friends very quickly. Just think of what would happen if you made him angry; imagine him being able to attack you with a legion of robot arms 600 miles away.
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
wheel chairs? fsck THAT... I want to control a Gundam, dammit.
I mean -- that is probabbly the *only* reason to design a big robot in the shape of a human -- so humans can control it with roughly the same movements and feedbacks.
small side note: that is one UGLY monkey. I mean... can't they find a cuter monkey for experiments like this?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Why do I picture a roomfull of monkeys remotely wired up to some ICBM's deep underground in norad?
"Sir monkey 211 has located osama bin laden and is going in for the kill!"
"Give him a bannana!"
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these !
Imagine the royalties from everyone who ever moves their limbs...
The amazing thing? One of the arms was 600 miles away. So, they transmitted and translated the "commands" into motion in less than 300 milliseconds!"
That sounds very similar to moving a character around in an online game. 300 milliseconds is nothing as far as transmission speed goes. A 300 ping in an online game is awful (even with a 56k modem!) Somehow, I doubt that most of that 300 milliseconds was taken up by transmissing the data 600 miles. More likely, most of that time was actually taken up by computations.
"Dr. Banzai is using a laser to vaporize a pineal tumor without damaging the parthogenital plate. A subcutaneous microphone will allow the patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain."
"Like, 'raise my left arm?'"
"Or 'throw the harpoon.' People are gonna come from all over. This boy's an Eskimo."
But I'm sure that in the miserable annals of the earth, this accomplishment will be duly enshrined.
(sorry)
This would make those long-distance relationships *much* more enjoyable.
It would be great to be able to attach artificial limbs that worked right off of one's brainwaves (so long as there wasn't interference or somebody yanking your wire by accident).
Another important thing they'll need to figure out is how to get and interpret feedback. That is, to allow for the sense of feeling from the hand/etc being moved to be translated back to the brain. I think to some extent it's been done already, and one thing nicer than having a robotic hand would be having a robotic hand you can feel with.
disclaimer: I claim no responsibility those who respond to this post with comments of a sexual or otherwise immature nature - phorm/I.
I wonder if this technology could be adapted, so that as a person thinks of a letter, the sensors could translate the neuron pattern into an ASCII code. Imagine typing without the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Had you actually read the article, you would have found out that they later hooked up a monkey to control a cursor on the screen via neuronal impulses, and the monkey was able to control it with no physical movement. The article also goes into how this kind of feedback allowed their software to increase its precision.
In conclusion, RTFA.
Same goes for you mods that modded up this guy.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Delays like that were programmed into the system to compensate for the way neurons worked and communicated, different impulses had to be selectively delayed to perform the desired motion. Didn't really have anything to do with the connection....
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Doesn't anyone care about my problems, that happen to be able to be solved with a Dr. Octopus suit?
Why does science always seem to be against my goals?
i can be less worried that my wife would cheat on me because i can still pleasure with my robotic arm miles away on my business trips
my blog
I just hope that the software which takes in the decoded signal doesn't have a bug. Otherwise U never know, you may intend to shake the hand of the person in front of you, and you may end up punching him on the nose... and to make it worse, when the person tries to hit you back, ur robotic leg refuses to run saying a critical error has ocurred.
Actually I can think of many other scenarios, but I think you get the picture.
What's under yellowstone?
They could detect what a monkey thinks and feed to a robot ! So the reverse would also become possible soon ? Feed electrical signals to the monkey and then monkey moves it's arms accordingly !
Jeeze ! then we'd capture what one monkey thinks and transport that signals to another monkey sitting faraway ! Then we may progress that to human beings. Oops, one human being thinks & another does the work - sounds terrible.