Meet Idoya, a 12 pound, 32 inch monkey on a treadmill in a lab in North Carolina. Idoya managed to make a 200 pound, 5 foot tall humanoid robot (CB) in Kyoto (Japan) walk … using only her mind.

“It’s walking!” Dr. Nicolelis said. “That’s one small step for a robot and one giant leap for a primate.”

In a joint experiment between Duke University’s lab of  Dr. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis and the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, neurosignals from Idoya’s brain along with visual data interpreted by the computer were transmitted over a high-speed internet connection to CB.

As the treadmill was stopped after a while, live visual feedback of CB walking alone was enough for Idoya’s brain to keep sending ‘walking’ signals to the robot. Look ma’, no hand, no legs … just brainpower.

Think of the possibilities, such as brainpowered exoskeletons, people freed from the limitations of their dysfunctional bodies, etc. Also imagine possible futures opened up by brain-machine interfacing combined with trends in virtual worlds, avatars, neurocybernetics (e.g. Warwick‘s experiments re: human to human neural signal transfer), telepresence, hybrid societies, etc.

Via New York Times, image by Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

Related posts:

1. humans & robots: side by side
2. look, i’m thinking
3. mindreading

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:12 and is filed under future, science, technology, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.