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Walk like a monkey: A humanoid robot moves its legs at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International laboratory in western Japan, while being controlled by signals from a monkey on a treadmill from a lab in the USA. Credit: AFP TOKYO: It may walk like a Japanese robot, but it thinks like an American monkey. Japanese and U.S. researchers said Wednesday they have created a humanoid robot that acts according to the brain activity of a monkey all the way across the Pacific. The experiment was part of efforts to develop prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by the brains of people with disabilities. Via the Internet A laboratory in the western Japanese city of Kyoto unveiled a 155-centimetre-tall humanoid, with a friendly-looking face including bulging black eyes, who walked via signals coming into its legs through wires. Researchers said the robot was responding to the cortical brain activity of a monkey that was walking attached to wires on a treadmill at Duke University in North Carolina. The signal was sent via the Internet. "We were able to detect the monkey's brain activity while walking on the treadmill and relay the data from the United States to Japan," the state-backed Japan Science and Technology Agency said in a statement. "For the first time in the world, we were then able to make our humanoid robot in Japan walk in real-time in a similar manner as the monkey," it said. Monkeying around The robot was designed by the Japanese agency and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to move by responding to brain activity signals. Duke University had trained two monkeys to walk on two feet on treadmills. The activity of the animals' hundreds of neurons was recorded from their cortex and converted into data that could be transmitted online. "We can say that we have made another big step to the realisation of a neural prosthetic device that could one day restore lower limb motor functions for paralysed patients," the statement said. Readers' comments
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The really important thing
The really important thing here, is that it was done over the internet, not that wires connecting from a brain transmitted instructions to prosthetics!
Do u think so
hellow
Do u all think that it is good to use poor animal for your research purpose .How dare u man !!!!!!!!!let them to live them alone without your disturbance .Do u all get me
Do u think so
You're right. They should experiment on morons like you instead. Then again, you probably don't have the brain power to move the robot's legs. What an idiot!
To think about it,when
To think about it,when mastered, we can use this to send robots linked to soilders to battle, which in return will reduce the casualty rate drasticly in battlezones.
remote battle-bots
There's already been at least one sci-fi short story on this subject (the soldiers fought remotely using "Sloane suits," or something like that). We also have the video game soldiers controlling the MQ-9 Reaper missions over Iraq right now, so that's another example of remote war (over the internet).
And (more in the Gundam mobile suit vein) there's the robotic exoskeleton they're working on: http://www.scienceprog.com/robotic-suit-the-ultimate-outfit-for-super-soldier/
I guess war is going to the geeks.