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Robotic Arm Controlled By Monkey Thoughts
mallumax writes "The BBC reports that Pittsburgh University scientists have succeeded in creating a robotic arm, controlled by probes inserted into the brain of monkeys. The probes interpret signals from individual nerve cells in the motor cortex. Monkeys were able to grasp and hold food with the robotic arm. Since the number of nerve signals for even small movements is huge the scientists used an averaging algorithm to obtain the movement signals."
That's my monkey controlled robot arm's hand on your ass.
Wouldn't this also be a sign that monkeys are capable of fairly sophisticated tool use?
"The inventors believe it could help people who have lost limb function through disease or trauma." Why are all these types of enhancements framed in terms of the disabled? We are disabled. Why must we hunger, breath air, thirst, sleep? I wonder if these researchers are just giving the public this. Can they see the obvious leap to transhumanism?
Transcend Humanity. Please.
As long as the monkey doesn't have a nipple fetish I think we'll be fine.
Is there such thing as an obligatory Sealab 2021 quote yet?
News Anchor: Scientists have successfully transplanted little Jango's brain into a robot monkey body. on a sad note, however, Jambo died late last night after drinking his own urine.
Sparks: Hey, Skip. What do you think about all this robot stuff?
Murphy: Why? Are we under attack?!
Sparks: No..but that robot monkey on the news..
Murphy: You're kidding! That guy's a robot monkey?
See here:h tml
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/faculty/schwartz.s
It seems he does joint work with CMU but his official position is at UPitt(as we sometimes call it).
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
The following is an acceptable question to ask:
"Should we really be attaching electronics to monkey neurons?"
Robot Monkey Arms flings robot poo!!
Remember they are using the tool like they would use their own arm. Monkeys already can grasp--having opposable thumbs.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
"In this world gone mad, we won't spank the monkey, the monkey will spank us."
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
people experimented with monkey thoughts
Besides the obvious addition of extra limbs a la Doc Oc from Spiderman, imagine what it would be like if everyday people had loads of mechanical limbs. As if drivers on cell phones werent bad enough. Now people can drive, talk on the phone, type something on their laptop, eat, and read the newspaper at the same time.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65468, 00.html?tw=wn_story_related
From the article:
"Our biggest problem is durability of the probes. Typically they last for about six months."
I'd say a bigger problem is that to make this work, you have to stick friggin' needles into the brain!
How about some sort of non-invasive sensor cap as the "next step."
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
shit at blindingly fast speeds. Ex-cellent.
So when this tech matures will they be able to attatch a 3rd arm to my back so i can scratch my ass without distracting me from other activities. cool, but where would i buy shirts?
we can teach them to type! /.ers.
This will do wonders for the quality of discussion on Slashdot. CmdrTaco, if your reading this, please give extra mod points to non-human
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
The article says the team's biggest problem is that after about 6 months tissue grown begins to interfere with transmission of signals to the probe.
This will no doubt limit the adoption of monkey cyborgs in RTOS and embedded spaces, and proves the old adage, "Always mount a scratch monkey".
Posted with Mozilla
When given pen and paper, it wrote down:
"Developers, developers, developers!!!!"
This work is *OLD*. Take a look at the Boston Arm for examples of why it doesn't work well. The electrodes cannot yet be permanently linked to small enough numbers of neurons to prevent huge amounts of signal noise, and you get a minimum of half a second of phase delay in the control systems to average out the noise. And the smaller you make the electrodes, the higher the impedance of the electrode, which also reduces your available signal level and potentially lowers your signal/noise.
Mechanical arms reading motion of other moscles still works a lot faster than any of the neural implants. Look at David Edell's work at MIT for examples of potentially useful electrode technologies, involving electroplated slots in semiconductor grade silicon.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a monkey arm controlled by robot thoughts.
According to a Popular Science article on the subject, several humans have already undergone similar treatments, allowing them to control a computer mouse by thought. In addition, scientists were able to use a weak FM transmitter to circumvent uncomfortable wiring.
That's my fembot's gorilla controlled ass!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I think I saw an article here sometime ago about raven's fashioning tools out of paperclips in order to snag food.
A quick search on google turns up an entire site devoted to tool use in birds.
to produce articles and comments on Slashdot!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
First off, it's the University of Pittsburgh, not Pittsburgh University.
The actual web site for Schwartz's lab:
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/
The above link has neat videos of the monkey moving the arm around.
Researchers like Schwartz who record from motor areas of the brain do cool stuff, but I'm personally more interested in folks like the Andersen Lab who do recording from more goal-oriented areas. Basically, it's a difference between a command to "move my elbow this much" versus "I want to grab this object."
Here's a PDF link to a paper published by Schwartz and others in 2002. Here's the abstract:
Direct Cortical Control of 3D Neuroprosthetic Devices
Dawn M. Taylor, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, Andrew B. Schwartz
Three-dimensional (3D) movement of neuroprosthetic devices can be controlled by the activity of cortical neurons when appropriate algorithms are used to decode intended movement in real time. Previous studies assumed that neurons maintain fixed tuning properties, and the studies used subjects who were unaware of the movements predicted by their recorded units. In this study, subjects had real-time visual feedback of their brain-controlled trajectories. Cell tuning properties changed when used for brain-controlled movements. By using control algorithms that track these changes, subjects made long sequences of 3D movements using far fewer cortical units than expected. Daily practice improved movement accuracy and the directional tuning of these units.
No, the animal rights groups don't care if or how much the animals suffer, they just don't want them being used in research, period. They're in no more danger of being firebombed if the monkey gets hurt or even killed than if the monkey is just fine.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Why am I not? Er... I'm ashamed to admit I'd never read that term before, although I seem to grasp the concept.
Well, that wasn't really my point, I was just stressing the point that an extra arm attached in this fashion at the age of 20 wouldn't be easy to "manage."
As for the other point, you're partially correct. Sensory information is conducted, and elaborated, in the thalamus, but it reaches consciousness only at the last neuron in the pathway, which is located in an area of the cortex just behind the one controlling motion. Such area also has extensive connections with memory, associative and "biohumoral" areas. Damage to the thalamus may lead to absent or impaired sensation, whereas destruction of the sensory cortex leads to total absence of conscious sensation. Both structures are part of the sensory pathways, though, so they're both essential.
As for that recent case, I haven't read about it, but that would depend on the level of the lesion. For example, if only axons (the 'cables') conducting information from the inner ear to the brainstem were damaged, the injection of stem cells might have stimulated the repairs of those connections. A broken axon can nowadays be repaired, although it depends on the lesion. A dead neuron cannot.
Of course, this doesn't mean we couldn't be able one day to "start over" by injecting new, indifferentiated neuronal stem cells which could then differentiate into full-fledged neurons and get back to work. This is actually being researched in Parkinson's disease, where a particular kind of neurons in the basal ganglia die. There's hope that by injecting stem cells in the area might lead to re-population and renewed functionality. Such procedures might turn out to also work in brain injured patients, or in those who just had their third arm installed...
Robots don't kill people.
Monkey-controlled robots kill people.
I was watching the Discovery channel awhile ago (probably close to a year, if not more) and saw something that may have related to this research. The scientists began by giving the monkeys a joystick (or mouse, memory is hazy) and when the monkeys moved the cursor to a box on the screen they would receive a treat. Then they took away the control and wired the monkey's brain so that (s)he could simply use thought to control the cursor on the screen. Apparently this was done by thinking of the same movements that the monkey would do to maneuver the cursor but not actually physically performing the action. I'm kind of curious if this current robotic arm is an extention (no pun intended) of that research or completely unrelated.
http://www.dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=710 0
I was under the impression that this experiment occured in October of 2003 at Duke University.
...that scientists are getting fairly sophisticated at using monkeys.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.