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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."
I think the distance is easy to explain, and I doubt it was for show. The research seems to originate from Duke. They likely decided they wanted to see if a monkey could control a humanoid robot but making a robot to see so was outside of the scope of what they were trying to do, they are just making the interface. So they searched out some other team making humanoid robots (which Japan seems to have a lot of). It was likely much easier to setup an internet link to connect the two groups as opposed to meeting in the same location. To meet you would have to move a lot of people and a lot of equipment, all of which would be a customs nightmare. Moving monkeys back and forth over international borders probably requires a lot of checks and paperwork and what not, just as I am sure moving research technology does as well, especially something that large.
To sum up, it was a hell of a lot cheaper and faster that way.
The article is not claiming that the Monkey is directly controling actuators. The monkey is walking, and the signals from it's brain (several hundred neurons), are being used to control the walking motion of the robot. Obviously the processing of monkey neurons response -> robot control is being performed in software specifically tuned to this one monkey with implants. The interesting thing about this experiment is not that they trained a monkey to walk a robot (they didn't), but rather that the monkey was able to keep the robot walking after it had stopped moving itself. This means that all those neurons that the researches are triggering the walking motions from are still going when the monkey thinks about walking but doesn't actually do it. We've known the brain is capable of this for some time, but this is the first experiment I have seen that appears to involve more than a simple "go stop" form of response. If they have tapped enough neurons to control all the actuators required for a robot to walk, then this is news indeed.