Slashdot Mirror
Ants Used For Mind-Controlled Robotic Limbs
mr sanjeev writes "Australian researchers are reducing the divide between science fiction and science reality by bringing the development of mind-controlled robotic limbs a few steps closer. Even the most fertile science fiction imagination might not see a link between the behavior of ant colonies and the development of lifelike robotic limbs, but that is the straightforward mathematical reality of research underway at the University of Technology, Sydney. The technology mimics the myoelectric signals used by the central nervous system (CNS) to control muscle activity. Artificial intelligence researchers have long used the complex interactions between ants to construct a pattern recognition formula to identify bioelectric signals. PhD student Rami Khushaba said 'swarm-intelligence' allows scientists to understand the body's electrical signals and use the knowledge to create a robotic prosthetic device that can be operated by human thought."
found this article very interesting
Be honest, raise your hand if the first thing you thought of when seeing that title was:
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Yet another research project that needs fine ants.
Now you can have a robotic limb on top of every anthill. The ants will no longer have to carry measly pieces of grains or berries back to the hill - they can work in concert and use the mighty grasp of a robotic arm. How will you compete in this brave new world, mankind?
The problem is, they spend so much time trying to get it to interface with the nerves in the same way as the original limb. Ideally, sure, we'd like it to go that way. But that's a long way off.
If they could just get it to read some signals, any signals, the methods for controlling it could be learned by the recipient.
Humans are born with the capability of mastering our limbs; fine motor coordination isn't something we're born with, it's learned. Why try to write software to do that?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Hope they use Army ants or Fire ants. Robots that destroy everyting in their path or squirt acid cocktails would freaking rock. THe first 2 prosthetics available sould be Mandibles and stingers. then they can branch out into other insectoid robot prosthetics like Pinchers, Scorpion tails and wings. I forsee a bold new future.
Question is who will be the first to reverse engineer their prosthetic arm to control ants instead?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
http://inttech.blogspot.com/2008/11/sci-fi-and-real-science-collide.html
Yes real science and Sci-Fi are colliding. This research can have amazing benefits for people suffering from a wide range of conditions and limb loss.
Think Deeply.
... if your foot falls asleep, it feels like there's ants running around on it?
I'm looking forward to the day when I can crush someone's throat with the power of my evil bionic hand. Until then, I'll just have to choke them by roasting habanero peppers in a dry skillet.
I wonder how long it'll take for artificial limbs to become perfect substitutes, the kind of thing you can even forget you have. My glasses are so much a part of me and so light, I could easily forget I'm wearing them aside from the bit about things not being blurry. I wonder what it would take for an artificial hand to be good enough to play piano, type on a keyboard, providing perfect sensory feedback and accuracy.
What's the hard part about wiring the limbs up to the nerves? I remember reading about a special adhesive developed that could be sticky on one end for nerves, a proper digital interface on the other side, and the signals would be transmitted properly.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The entire reason this article was posted to slashdot was so that people could make this reference, and feel damn clever about it.
Does it stop working if they remove the teddy bear?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
That for me means somewhere in the 250-255 milliseconds range, which is still a quarter of a second. That doesn't seem particularly fast to me. Not fast enough for driving or catching falling objects, for example. True cyborg implants are still some way away in the future.
Just had a thought: It must be difficult to program the artificial limb to respond to the correct signals. If you told me to flex a specific muscle, I'd actually have a pretty hard time isolating it and doing it. If I no longer had the muscle in question, it would be even harder. It makes me wonder, is that really how the nervous system works? Maybe we don't have a 'wire' from the brain to each muscle, we instead have a set of motions that we perform, each involving several muscles. Our brains can decide between those sets, and can use combinations of the sets to 'tweak' the movement. If the brain finds that a motion is impossible given the current set, it can work on evolving a new set, but that process would only be possible with a fairly involved training process, a reroute of the neural pathways.
What if you told people to go through a set of motions that involved other muscles as well, and used the intersections of the signals and muscles involved to isolate the correct signals? Maybe the story in the past couple days about replicating the Mona Lisa using polygons is a good analogy. The goal is to find a minimal set of signals (polygons) that form a basis for complete functionality.
-t.
Welcome our new thought-controlled battle mech piloting ant overlords. Why would they stop at human size, when they could become 60 feet tall and kick over OUR homes?!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll