Monkey's Brain is better than Humans?

Robot, made in Japan, thinks like a Monkey! Brain activity of a monkey is now being used to control the real-time walking patterns of a Robot. Strange, but true!

Japanese and U.S. researchers said on last Wednesday that they have just created a humanoid robot that purely acts as per the brain activity of a monkey, across the Pacific.

The robot moves its legs at a laboratory in Seika town in Kyoto prefecture, western Japan, January 15. As part of an experimental effort to develop prosthetic limbs which can be mentally controlled by people with disabilities, managed to create this Robot.

A laboratory in the city of Kyoto, Japan, the Japanese unveiled a 62-inch (155-centimetre) tall humanoid Robot, with a friendly face including black eyes, who walked using signals coming into the legs via wires. Researchers said the robot was responding to the cortical brain activity of a monkey that was walking attached to wires on a treadmill at Duke University in North Carolina. The signal was sent via the Internet.

Duke University

"We were able to detect the monkey's brain activity while walking on the treadmill and relay the data from the United States to Japan," the state-backed Japan Science and Technology Agency said in a statement.

"For the first time in the world, we were then able to make our humanoid robot in Japan walk in real-time in a similar manner as the monkey," it said. The robot was designed by the Japanese agency and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to move by responding to brain activity signals.

Duke University had trained two monkeys to walk on two feet on treadmills.

The activity of the animals' hundreds of neurons was recorded from their cortex and converted into data that could be transmitted online. "We can say that we have made another big step to the realisation of a neural prosthetic device that could one day restore lower limb motor functions for paralysed patients," the statement said.














You can get more close-up information at this video here: