Robot Uses Biological Brain
March 29th, 2009Via: Seed Magazine:
Kevin Warwick’s new robot behaves like a child. “Sometimes it does what you want it to, and sometimes it doesn’t,” he says. And while it may seem strange for a professor of cybernetics to be concerning himself with such an unreliable machine, Warwick’s creation has something that even today’s most sophisticated robots lack: a living brain.
Life for Warwick’s robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. “It’s an innate response of the neurons,” says Warwick, “they try to link up and start communicating.”
For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.
A relay of signals between the sensor, motors, and brain dictate the robot’s behavior. When it approaches an object, the number of electrical pulses sent from the sonar device to the brain increases. This heightened electrical stimulation causes certain neurons in the robot’s brain to fire. When the electrodes on which the firing neurons rest detect this activity, they signal the robot’s wheels to change direction. The end result is a robot that can avoid obstacles in its path.
At first, the young robot spent a lot of time crashing into things. But after a few weeks of practice, its performance began to improve as the connections between the active neurons in its brain strengthened. “This is a specific type of learning, called Hebbian learning,” says Warwick, “where, by doing something habitually, you get better at doing it.”
The robot now gets around well enough. “But it has a biological brain, and not a computer,” says Warwick, and so it must navigate based solely on the very limited amount of information it receives from a single sensory device. If the number of sensory devices connected to its brain increases, it will gain a better understanding of its surroundings. “I have another student now who has started to work on an audio input, so in some way we can start communicating with it,” he says.
Kevin Warwick has always been a fantasist.
Waking up to Warwick: is the media-obsessed fantasist on the way out?
@dt
Not that I care that much, but a quick skim of the Register piece, written in 2000, reveals it to be a hatchet job derived from a bunch of hearsay that doesn’t even allege anything other than the accusers’ insecurities.
Please, please don’t make a fatal error in thinking that this is just some stunt by an ego maniac.
Artificial intelligence hasn’t delivered the goods. Everyone knows it. That’s why they have shifted to biological mimicry and brought in the wet workers with their living brain cells and electrode arrays.
Since they have failed to cook up the algorithms from scratch, the plan is to use the living tissue to derive the algorithms. And then attach a gun to it. It doesn’t need to be able to write poetry or carry on a conversation.
I doubt if ANY neuroscience programs in the U.S. would exist without grants from the war related interests. (I haven’t studied the influence of war related interests in international neuroscience programs, but I suspect that it is pervasive). I worked in a neuroscience related business as the “hired help” for their computer systems. I was astonished by what I learned about where the money came from to do the research. It was all Pentagon related.
@Kevin
It really all depends on what you’re trying to do; data-mine the internet or create fearless, merciless, zombie-warriors / sex-slaves.
@ ltcolonelnemo
It really all depends on what you’re trying to do; data-mine the internet or create fearless, merciless, zombie-warriors / sex-slaves.
Sorry, if there’s a point there, I missed it.
@Kevin-
You don’t need a rat-brain to data-mine the internet, you might be better-served by a rat-brain piloting an autonomous infantry mech.
I don’t know how you can say that the promise of AI hasn’t been delivered. The answer is unknown.
I don’t know how you can say that the promise of AI hasn’t been delivered. The answer is unknown.
HA. The university crooks I used to work for said stuff like that. But that’s just grant swindling speak to those of us who haven’t internalized the bullshit. They know that they’re attempting (key word) to build technologies that will be used in autonomous killing machines.
you might be better-served by a rat-brain piloting an autonomous infantry mech
Really? How am I better served by this?
@Kevin
Perhaps the university crooks you used to work for didn’t have their hands on the most advanced stuff. Perhaps they didn’t have the clearance necessary to be party to all advances made in their field. If one routinely espouses the belief that whole fields of technology can be classified and virtually stricken from the record known by the civilians, then it is conceivable that even alleged specialists in a given field can not know the full extent of the state of the art. There are things still classified that date back to WWII. And as far as most people are concerned, virtually everything in the black ops world may as well be classified, since the very nature of black ops calls for plausible denial and secrecy.
I wasn’t referring to you specifically vis-a-vis the rat brain; I was referring to the technocrats.
In any case, I was merely making the point that silicon-based AI and rat-brain-based AI might have strengths and weaknesses that would lend them to different applications.