Posted on behalf of Tim Sands
News rampage, that is. The world’s press has gone into something of a frenzy over a report in New Scientist of a robot guided by “rat brains” – more accurately rat neurons in a dish.
This is just a small sample from around the globe: Wired, News.com.au, India Times, Telegraph.
This experiment is somewhat different from the monkey-brain controlled robotic arm described in Nature in May and the earlier robots controlled by whole monkey and lamprey brains. In these new experiments the response of disembodied rat neurons in a dish were used to control a free-roaming robot called Gordon.
The Reading University team grew 300,000 neurons extracted from foetal rat brains in a cell-culture dish, which soon began to spontaneously form connections (Not exactly the “blob of rat brain” described by Scottish tabloid The Daily Record).
An array of 80 electrodes monitored the electrical activity of the neurons. The wheeled robot itself has an ultrasound detector that gives a signal when it trundles towards an obstacle, which is then sent to the cells over a Bluetooth link. The response of groups of cells that consistently activate when given this stimulus is used as a cue to return instructions to the robot telling it to take avoiding action.
This neuron-guided robot has an 80% success rate in avoiding walls (other similar experiments conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology have claimed 90% success). New Scientist has some video of the robot in action.
The research is not purely about outlandish robo-fun. The researchers say that studying the spontaneous patterns of electrical activity they measure in the cell culture can give us insight into neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and epilepsy.
“This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorises its experiences. This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine,” says self-effacing team member Kevin Warwick, braving the glare of publicity once more. It should be noted that Kevin Warwick himself also walks the cyborg-walk, having had an electrode array implanted in his own arm.
Given the lurid headlines there has surprisingly been more bemusement than outrage about the experiments among the newspapers. The same cannot be said of their readers’ comments sections.
AsiaOne were one of the few outlets honest enough to highlight the true appeal of this experiment with the title of their story “Robo-rat: creepy or exciting?”, as were Gizmodo, exclaiming “Holy Crap, a Robot with a Rat’s Brain.”
One concerned and wisely anonymous commenter on the New Scientist report asks, “Is it three laws safe? I sense the apocalypse on its way…”