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Monkey's Thoughts Make Robot Walk
geekbits writes "For all those who have at one time or another been too lazy to get up off the couch and go to the fridge and get a beer, heat up some pizza, or change the channel when the remote is missing, we may be one step closer to being able to keep our tushes parked just a little while longer. There may also be some slightly more noble implications here. According to an article in The New York Times, in an experiment at Duke University, a 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan."
Being able to read the monkey's brain sounds like the only innovation here, not making the robot walk. Reading between the lines, it doesn't sound like the monkey is really controlling the robot in any real sense at all.
Several things make me question that. One, why is the robot in north Carolina and the monkey in Japan? It's just for show. Nothing of scientific significance is being demonstrated by that. We all know that internet can connect two gizmos across large distances. The experiment could have been conducted much more simply at one location and made no less effective a point (except to clueless investors maybe).
Secondly, because of the distance, there is a significant delay (TFA says 250ms, about what I might have guessed.) This would seem to preclude the monkey being able to control the robots actuators in any direct sense. I.e. lift thigh, swing lower leg forward, position foot, lower thigh, positioning body over front leg. Walking is a "controlled fall". No way you could issue all those commands 250ms ahead of seeing or feeling their effect. You'd trip and fall.
So, what is the monkey really doing? I doubt if he is even thinking "left, right, left, right" because even that would be hard to coordinate with so much lag.
Finally, why is there a damn robot in the first place? Wouldn't it be much easier to have the commands control a computer animation? You could do that in such a way that the model would look much more interesting to the monkey... it could look like another monkey, a giant walking banana, whatever.
My guess is that they are simply getting a binary command value from the monkey: "walk" or "don't walk". And the whole robot thing is just for effect. I hate to be such a cynic but this looks like showmanship, not science. If that is the case then this is equivalent to the simple video games that have been demonstrated using brain control.
However, I could certainly imagine that the journalist totally failed to understand the experiment and maybe something important was lost in his explanation of it.
...but the feedback was lousy.
Monkey : Move Foot Forward
600ms later...
Robot : OK....Oh no, I'm falling over, quick move the other foot
600ms later...
Monkey : Move Other Foot Forward
600ms later...
Robot : I can't do that dave, I've fallen over
Although I assume in actuallity they left most of the balance control to the robot end of things; either that or the Monkey was psychic.
(Or more likely they've got a nice low-latency academic link)
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/14/science/0115-sci-ROBOTa_large.jpg
Tell me that graphic didn't come from The Onion.
-1 not first post
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides, your legs got nothing to do. Some machine, doing that for you.
I want my robot to do my house work and fetch me beer and food, not hang from the light fitting and throw faeces at me.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
The basic idea is quite simple: start by sampling a whole bunch of neurons (usually a local EEG or fMRI of some sort). Then,
In humans, obtain two recordings (one blank and one while thinking about doing X), then diff the two and map to X'.
In monkeys, also get two recordings (one blank and one while doing X), then diff the two and also map to X', hoping that doing X reads the same as thinking about doing X.
You'd need to repeat these steps a bunch of times to get good signal to noise, and also need several controls (thinking about Y, Z) to make sure the mapping is specific enough. Normally, the technique is just good enough to allow quadriplegics to click buttons and such, but takes lots of effort and patience (and lots of costly equipment).
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
i was looking at this today: http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/TK1WBA9Xl3c
watch after 0:44, the monkey learnt how to control the robotic arm with its thoughts in order to feed itself:)
This is a different monkey, but same concept... he doesn't look particularly drugged nor do I see any exposed brain.
http://www.random-good-stuff.com/2007/02/20/video-monkey-controls-robotic-arm-with-mind-beware-of-robot-monkeys/
The point? Proof of concept for investors I would suspect. Tele presence is now much more closer to reality. There will be big money in this stuff down the line. I remember reading a forward looking military report that planned on mind controlled planes in 2020 or something like that, and that's just one application.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
Sounds like a good concept, but I don't understand how to get a monkey on the other side of the world to think about getting me my beer and pizza?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
*Yawn* Robot Monkey overlords... something about welcoming... you know the drill. I don't feel like writing it all out.
This sig is false.
This is a combination of previous works.
/.ers, research on walking robot seems so common in Japan that it's probably the second national sport (right after "girls in school uniform fetishism" ^_^ )
Monkey mind reading has been done before.
Monkey controlling a robotic arm has been done before too, and as far as I remember, the monkey even got it to the point of controlling the robotic arm without moving herself.
Remote controlling of robots has been done before (trans-atlantic surgery operation, the surgeon operating the robot in the US and the patient being in Europe).
And as pointed by other
What's the point of this study ? Combining all this together.
- It's the first time brain waves are used to control a movement as complicated as walking.
Thus, this is a technical demo that brings closer hopes for paralysed patients. (As a different solution than spinal nerves regrowth).
--> (The previous experiments where robotic-arm only, thus potential application only to amputees).
- It's the first time that brain-waves remote controlling is attempted.
The inputs are much more complex and much more abundant compared to the current joystick-controlled robots.
This technical demo proves that the latency and bandwidth can cope with brainwave-control, although with a lag that maybe won't be short enough for reflex based movements.
But it is still opening interesting possibilities :
Just replace the monkey with a scientist and the treadmill environment with either some dangerous environment or some miniaturised one or a remote place where the scientist expertise is not readily available.
--> Current controls of robots (like the one used in surgery) are joystick based. Although there are still a lot of movement that can easily be performed with such controls, there are some limitation. Natural movement that are mapped to a robot through brainwave control could bring much more agility.
Also a lot of additional things have to be controlled in a surgical robot (camera motions for example). For now they are still controller with the same pair of joystick (because, you see, a surgeon has only 2 hands to hold them) and using a combination of pedals to switch what the inputs are controlling.
With such brainwave-control technology, other movement could be mapped to the camera control (I think head motions could be the most natural ones) leaving the hand motion free to continue controlling the instruments.
So, no there are no revolutionary new technologies involved here.
But its a new combination of technologies that represent a nice step toward very promising applications.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The signals in the brain are calling to learned motion patterns stored remotely in the ganglia (little brain-like things attached to the spine). A good computer analogy would be shader programs--the software makes very vague system calls (render these triangles), which cause separate (shader) programs to actually draw the graphics from inside the video card.
What these guys are doing is capturing the "system calls" from the brain, and sending them to *their own* central pattern generators in the robot. According to TFA, these CPGs were trained by data-mining a correlation between the monkey's motion (picked up with standard motion-capture methods) and the firing of its neurons. So, the first step is actually to train the robot to obey the monkey's brain.
What happens next is the really interesting part, though. The monkey's brain quickly realizes that it is controlling two separate things (the monkey and the robot), and moves the control for the legs to different neurons so it can control them separately. This is why, when they stopped the monkey's treadmill, it was able to keep controlling the robot without moving its own legs.
This research isn't all that new, though. Something similar was done a while back (maybe a year ago?) where they had a monkey controlling an extra arm through the same type of system. Before that, there was a study on epilepsy patients that involved the same brain sensors, where humans were able to control a mouse cursor after trying for about one minute. IMHO, this problem was completely solved long before this project; electronic control outputs from the brain just happened to be one of those things that are way easier than they look.
What someone really needs to do now is get an electronic brain *input* that works this well, and doesn't cause seizures or degradation over time. Once that's done, then some really amazing stuff will start to be possible.
Besides just being able to control machines with your thoughts, or having an in-head network connection, or some other such nonsense, this is one of the technologies that could truly make it possible to live forever, for people who are alive today. If one's whole cerebral cortex is wired to a computer that's emulating (get this) more brain, then it's going to do exactly what it does with the robot, and start using it. Since most of the brain naturally tries to maximize its redundancy, you'd get a hybrid digital-biological brain that could be trained over time to work both together and separately. Assuming that they're together when you "die", then that one thread of consciousness will simply continue to exist on the digital side, and you will survived death. At this point, you can get in your robot and go do stuff, or run around in some kind of digital world. Of course, computer hardware today would not be able to do this, but in 10-15 years it could very well be possible using just consumer stuff (and will definitely be possible using a server).
As a side bonus, it will also cause a very entertaining political flamewar, when the fundies realize that there's a machine that traps your soul. Of course they will go insane trying to stop it, and there will be a big debate about the property rights of "dead" people...