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Underground > Laboratory >

Monkey Trained to Use Robotic Arm

14:10 / 27.10.04

Check out this article in today's Guardian.

A team from the University of Pittsburgh restrained the arms of a monkey and wired a neural prosthesis - a robot arm with a mobile shoulder, elbow and griping device - into its brain. The arm intercepted signals from electrodes attached to probes in the nerve cells of the motor cortex, the brain region that controls movement.

An algorithm devised at Pittsburgh interpreted the activity in the monkey's brain as the animal tried to move its own arm, and transmitted the signals to the robotic arm.

I'm not up on the latest developments in robotics so I don't know if this is a breakthrough or standard practice, but it sounds pretty amazing to me so I thought I'd share it. Could this be a significant step towards functional prostheses that could completely replace missing limbs?

All Acting Regiment

20:17 / 02.11.04

Did the monkey realise what was going on? I mean, did it work out that it could use the arm to pick things up?

I guess if you knew you were going to have a robotic arm fitted, it would be okay cause you'd understand, but i'm having trouble with the ethics of this.

12:36 / 13.11.04

Did the monkey realise what was going on? I mean, did it work out that it could use the arm to pick things up?

This sounds remarkably similar to something I saw earlier on in the year. Can't remember where, though, so this is probably a pointless post.

A chimp was sat in front of a basic video game and given a set of controls, the idea of the game being to pick up one item on screen and drop it onto another, using arm movements. The areas of the brain that were firing off for each movement were monitored and recorded. After it got the hang of this, the controls were removed and various prongs and whatnot shoved into its rubbery brain matter, and it was sat in front of the game again. Again, it was moving the items around the screen just as it had done before, but purely by the electrical impulses thrown through its brain and into the prongs and whatnot. These prongs and whatnot were also linked to a robotic arm in order to prove that the impulses were directly translatable into proper movement, wdemonstrated when the arm made exactly the motions required to move the objects on the screen.

It might have been the same experiment and I'm just misremembering it, actually. Whatever, it's not that the chimp knew it was moving the robotic arm, but that it didn't didn't realise that it wasn't moving its own arms.

16:08 / 13.11.04

I believe in the experiment you're remembering, the monkey was moving a cursor on a screen. The crazy part is that when the implants were first plugged in, the monkey would make the hand motions it made before with the joystick. Eventually, the monkey learned it didn't have to move it's hand, so it stopped using it and manipulated the cursor while still.

Keep in mind, this is the version my psych professor told us, and she wasn't known for her accuracy. I think it happened back in the spring if you want to look for info on your own.

Back to the topic, the big breakthrough with the robotic arm, is its the first time the brain has been used to directly manipulate anything physical, not just something on a screen. Granted it is still just data in a machine and not that different, but still, it's cool.

22:49 / 05.12.04

Not quite the same group of monkeys per se, but in Wisconsin there have been two studies using humans to control cursors on screen, play primitive games and the like, with some success. Apparently before undergoing brain surgery they elected to help out in the study.

It's interesting how scientists try to bridge the gap in both directions, having the humans try to control the objects while the programming is tuned to sync more with the expressions made by the brain.

11:32 / 07.12.04

There's a news story on the BBC website showing a similar thing that can be done without any implants. This is obviously a more useful development as many people would be wary about having chips implanted.