“A TRUE LEARNING MACHINE with LIVING CELLS” 
“ANIMAL CYBORGS ARE REAL”

Kevin Warwick, once a cyborg and still a researcher in cybernetics at the University of Reading, has been working on creating neural networks that can control machines. He and his team have taken the brain cells from rats, cultured them, and used them as the guidance control circuit for simple wheeled robots. Electrical impulses from the bot enter the batch of neurons, and responses from the cells are turned into commands for the device. The cells can form new connections, making the system a true learning machine.  He and his competitors continue to move this technology forward – animal cyborgs are real.

The skills of these rat-robot hybrids are very basic at this point. Mainly the neuron control helps the robot to avoid walls. Yet that obstacle avoidance often shows clear improvement over time, demonstrating how networks of neurons can grant simple learning to the machines. These machines are being controlled by biological cells! It’s simply amazing.

Warwick was busy in the beginning of the year, publishing three papers in regards to biological control of robots. He gave a great overview of the field in both the Defence Science Journal and the Proceedings of the IME, and then he published a really interesting discussion on the implications of these systems in the journal of Ethics and Information Technology. As Warwick points out again and again, these cyborgs are going to become more advanced, probably sooner rather than later. Current cultures of neurons have about 100,000 cells, but only a small fraction are actually involved in controlling the robot circuits at any given time. Research teams continually find new ways to increase the size and response of these cultures, as well as how long they can survive. Eventually, we’ll have a cultured system that is roughly the size of the simplest of mammalian brains. At that point these systems will be able to accomplish much more, but how will we classify devices that contain living cells, especially if they become somewhat intelligent?

Artificial intelligence is usually pursued through computer science, but biotech systems like Warwick’s raise the possibility that cybernetics may be a quicker route to success. There are several other teams around the world working on similar systems (Steve Potter’s group at Georgia Tech is doing pretty well). Collectively these researchers are pushing the boundaries of what biologically controlled machines can perceive and learn. Hopefully we’ll have breakthroughs in animal cybernetics soon. It should be interesting to see if Warwick announces any new successes at his presentation at the IEEE SMC conference this month. I would love some more amazing videos of rat brain robots.

Videos

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There’s just something about those  air muscles that soft robots use that creeps me out, but it’s hard to deny that as the designs get more and more refined, the robots themselves are getting capable enough to actually, you know, start doing stuff. Take this soft robot from Harvard, for example: it not only walks, it knows several different gaits and can deflate to stuff itself through tiny little gaps.

And there’s nothing solid in there at all: You could probably smash this thing with a hammer a whole bunch of times and it would still keep coming for you. And that’s part of the idea. The other part of the idea is that soft robots can adapt themselves to squeeze through gaps (as in the vid above) and otherwise get into places that robots with rigid structures might not be able to.

This particular robot (which comes from George M. Whitesides‘ lab at Harvard) distinguishes itself by being capable of several unique gait styles including walking, crawling, and slithering. Each of these gaits is controlled by pumping air at up to 10 psi into a succession of limbs, inflating and deflating elastomer compartments to provide temporary structure and rigidity. In addition to slipping through gaps, the robot can make it across things like felt cloth, gravel, mud, and Jell-O (don’t ask).

As the Harvard researchers explain in a paper in PNAS, the robot was inspired by animals like squid, starfish, worms that “do not have hard internal skeletons,” and the advantage of soft robotics is that “simple types of actuation produce complex motion.”

Pretend to act shocked that the development of this robot has been funded by DARPA, and then start exercising your imagination as to what could be done with an indestructible, unstoppable, squishably soft little robot.

http://youtu.be/2DsbS9cMOAE

“They need to make one that doesn’t have all those wires sticking out of its ass!”
(Youtube User Comment )

Camouflage Bendy Robot Changes Colour for Disguise

By Rebecca MorelleScience reporter, BBC News

A robot that can change colour to either blend in with or stand out from its surroundings has been created by scientists. The machine, designed by researchers at Harvard University, was inspired by the camouflage skills of sea creatures such as octopuses, cuttlefish and squid.

Like these cephalopods, the robot has a soft, rubbery body and can move with flexibility. The study is published in the journal Science. Professor George Whitesides, an author of the paper, said: “Conventional robotics is a pretty highly developed area, and if you look at various robots you find that most are basically built on the body plan of a mammal. “Our question is: Why do you have to do that? Why not think about organisms that are soft, that might have quite different structures and ways of moving and strategies for camouflage. And the obvious place to look is underwater.”

In 2011, the research team published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that outlined details of a “soft robot” that could crawl and bend under obstacles. The machine was made from silicon-based polymers, and its movement was driven by air pumping through tiny cylinders in its four “legs”.

Now the scientists have added another layer of complexity to these robots by giving them the ability to disguise themselves. The camouflage-bots are covered in a network of tiny channels. As different dyes are pumped in, the robots can quickly change their appearance. As well as changing colour, hot or cold fluids can be pumped into robots, enabling them to be thermally camouflaged, and fluorescent liquids allow them to glow in the dark.

Currently, the fluid is pulled in from a reservoir, but in the future it could be incorporated into the robot’s body.

Search and Rescue

Lead author Stephen Morin said the soft machines had similarities with organs or tissues and could have medical applications. He explained: “The idea is that if you have a system that can simulate muscle motion very well and a system that can transport fluid, by combining those you can fabricate that device to fit a specific surgical problem. “And in planning for surgery or training, you can use something like this in guilt-free way.”

The team also said the machines could have a future in search and rescue.  Prof Whitesides said: “For that kind of application, having it be able to advertise itself, for example, in a way that stood out against the dark would be a good thing.” He said the fact that the robots were lightweight, flexible and also relatively inexpensive was advantageous. He explained: “The nice thing about these systems is that their properties are very different from conventional robots. You get pretty complicated motions from pretty simple systems.

“For a mission like search and rescue, these kind of robots could in principle be throwaway. So if you took a $25,000 robot and sent it in and the building falls down, then that is a real issue. If you send one in which is $100 and the roof falls in, you really don’t care.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19286259

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Festo, a multinational robotics firm based in Germany, has made some of the most amazing biologically inspired robots out there. In one of our previous posts, “Festo’s Extraordinary Robots That Mimic Biology I”, you have seen air-penguins and mechanical elephant-arms but these are just few of Festo creations. In these videos, the air-ray, the bionic air-fish, the aqua-jelly, and more are shown. Festo is one of the world leaders in automation, with millions of parts installed in factories all over the globe. Their animal inspired robots are created by the efforts of their Bionic Learning Network. This collection of research groups from academia and industry is part advanced research initiative, part education organization.

Festo is a German industrial control and automation company based in Esslingen,Germany. Festo is an engineering driven company that sells pneumatic and electric actuators primarily to the automation industry.

Video: http://youtu.be/NNNfn7ac-rY

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Monkey Uses Brainwaves to Control Prosthetic Arm

Scientists have trained monkeys to control a robotic arm using the power of their thoughts. The research, which involved wiring electrodes into the animals’ brains, is aimed at producing controllable prosthetic limbs for patients with stroke, spinal cord injuries or neurodegenerative conditions.

The monkeys learned to feed themselves using the robotic arm and performed subtle movements such as approaching the food with the arm so as not to knock it over. The researchers believe the animals began to regard the arm as part of their own body.

Scientists have previously taught monkeys and human subjects to control a cursor on a screen or a simple grasping hand via their brain activity, but this is the first time experimenters have demonstrated that it is possible to perform complex behavioural tasks this way.

“In our research, we’ve demonstrated a higher level of precision, skill and learning,” said Prof Andrew Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “The monkey learns by first observing the movement, which activates his brain cells as if he were doing it … like sports training, where trainers have athletes first imagine that they are performing the movements they desire.”

The team, who report their research in Thursday’s issue of Nature, first trained the macaque monkeys to retrieve marshmallows — a favourite treat — by using a joystick to control the prosthetic arm. Once they had mastered this, the team inserted electrodes into the animals’ motor cortex and used brain signals there to control the arm’s movement.

Gripping hand

During the trials, the animals’ limbs were restrained in plastic tubes so that they could not reach for the food themselves. After some errors, the animals learned to perform subtle movements using the robotic arm, which has a jointed shoulder, elbow and wrist, as well as a gripping hand.

The research is a progression from a study reported in 2006 which involved the patient Matthew Nagle, a 25-year-old Massachusetts man who has been paralysed from the neck down since 2001. An implant in his brain allowed him to control a cursor on a screen and to open and close the hand on a prosthetic limb by thinking of the relevant actions.

Prof John Kalaska, an expert on the primate motor cortex at the University of Montreal in Quebec, said the latest research represented the “state of the art” in the field. “[It] could one day, in principle, help patients perform many everyday tasks such as eating, drinking from a glass or using a tool,” he wrote in a commentary on the work in Nature.

He warned that there were practical problems to overcome before controllable prosthetic limbs could be used in patients. Currently, animals do not receive any touch feedback from the object they are picking up. This will be important if patients are to use a strong enough grip to handle an object without holding it so tightly that they crush it. The durability of the implanted electrodes must also be improved, because at present they deteriorate within weeks or months.

Links

http://youtu.be/sm2d0w87wQE
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/28/monkey.arm

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This is no ordinary robot control system – a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made – and continue to make – connections with each other.

http://youtu.be/1-0eZytv6Qk

How Does it Work ?

http://youtu.be/wACltn9QpCc

Nextworld: Rat Brain Controlled Robots

Kevin Lounsberry:

I would give my every possession to become a cyborg (though it might cost a bit more than that) chances are I could get it all back no sweat if I get good improvements. Imagine having things like built in like night vision or zooming or ultraviolet. Imagine it not even being possible to flinch and make a mistake with your hands. imagine the possibility of extra storage space for your memory, or removable drives.

http://youtu.be/RcQ7ACgihAg

Walking Around on the Floor

This robot is controlled by the brain of a rat – making it the world’s first cyborg rodent.
http://youtu.be/1QPiF4-iu6g

Rat’s ‘brain’ used to power robot

A robot has been created which is powered by a rat’s “brain”.

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