Since the days of Alan Turing, the promise of a digital computer has been that of a universal machine, one that can be a word processor one minute and a robot brain the next.
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The robot can detect the brain signal corresponding to a person thinking about moving an arm, and then move the arm.
Designing a truly adaptive brain-robot interface that allows paralysed patients to directly teach a robot to do something could be immensely helpful, liberating them from the need to use a mouse and keyboard or touchscreen, designed for more capable users.
The research team hopes the simulated bee brain will produce a robot that can make decisions about what it senses rather than just carry out pre-programmed tasks.
My company, Romotive, builds a small, affordable robot that uses an iPhone as his brain.
Indeed, how else to explain why Honda has studied the maddeningly evasive cockroach (for anticollision technology), decoded the rice genome (to increase crop yields and create more-productive crops for biofuels) and developed a robot that can get instructions by reading human brain waves (to learn how machines and humans can better coexist).
To emulate this kind of behaviour - albeit in a more simplistic fashion - Dr Rao and his team are developing a hierarchical brain-computer interface for controlling the robot.
The simulated bee brain will then be used by a flying robot to help it make decisions about how to navigate safely.
Nicolelis and colleagues have shown that a rhesus monkey in North Carolina could, using only its brain, control the walking patterns of a robot in Japan.
The brain cells have been taught how to control the robot's movements so it can steer round obstacles and the next step, say its creators, is to get it to recognise its surroundings.
The creative brain of the team then makes a decision where a robot should make its pass or move.
The brain then crunches this data so that it can determine exactly when the robot should swing.
Called Rapyuta, the online "brain" describes objects robots have met and can also carry out complicated computation on behalf of a robot.
Dr Rao's team began by programming a humanoid robot with simple behaviours which users could then select with a wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that picked up their brain activity.
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