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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.
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?
That's not the impression I got. It seems more like the monkey was moving the tool as if it were it's own limb, i.e. the moneky tried to move its hand and the tool moved instead. If this is the case, all it shows is that monkeys can control their own limbs.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
I would think that there is plenty of non-robotic evidence that monkeys use and make simple tools, are skilled and knowledgable in their use and pass tool knowledge from individual to individual already in the wild. Monkeys have been trained to operate tools and devices before this, both in and out of laboratory settings. I wouldn't consider this a breakthrough or in any way revealing about monkeys, I would consider it more of a robotic/hapic/man-machine interface breakthrough.
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
When given pen and paper, it wrote down:
"Developers, developers, developers!!!!"
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.