Mick Hartley

The future just got a bit nearer:

Scientists in the U.S. and Japan have successfully used a monkey’s brain activity to control a humanoid robot — over the Internet.

This research may only be a few years away from helping paralyzed people walk again by enabling them to use their thoughts to control exoskeletons attached to their bodies, according to Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University and lead researcher on the project.

“This is an attempt to restore mobility to people,” said Nicolelis. “We had the animal trained to walk on a treadmill. As it walked, we recorded its brain activity that generated its locomotion pattern. As the animal was walking and slowing down and changing his pattern, his brain activity was driving a robot in Japan in real time.”

Nicolelis said he has been working on this research project for 10 years.

A year ago, doctors implanted 64 electrodes and a computer chip into the brains of two rhesus monkeys. Then last Thursday, the group was ready to start recording electrical signals from 200 of the animal’s brain cells as it walked on a treadmill.

Those signals were transmitted over the Internet to scientists at the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, where researchers fed the information into a humanoid robot that immediately began to respond to the monkey’s brain activity — walking at the same pace, slowing down when the monkey slowed, and changing its walking pattern to exactly match the animal’s.

They don’t tell us how much time the robot spent scratching its arse.