MIT Develops New, Different Rat-Brained Robot 20
MImeKillEr writes "Here's an article that explains that MIT has developed a coffee-cup sized robot that uses neurons from rat embryos embedded in silicon. It's the first instance in which cultured neurons have been used to control a robotic mechanism. This was made possible by placing a droplet of solution containing thousands of rat neuron cells onto a silicon chip that's embedded with 60 electrodes connected to an amplifier. The electrical signals that the cells fire at one another are picked up by the electrodes which then send the amplified signal into a computer. The computer, in turn, wirelessly relays the data to the robot."
Tell me again once they find something useful... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, if the robot would actually do something useful that we can't already build today with a cheap onboard computer, I would be impressed. But I suspect it doesn't. First, the article doesn't mention anything special it can do (it says it's a "thinker", but that's hardly productive unless we can figure out what it's "thinking" about). Secondly, it has only 60 connection points (surely not enough for any realistic kind of sensory input). Third, it has only "thousands of rat neuron cells". Finally, none of the researchers have any idea what they are doing (not that that's particulary bad, it's exactly what "research" means).
Sure, you can grow a cell-culture somewhere, and it may even have some of the same attributes as the real thing grown from the same cells. But it lacks it's overall organization (which is good, unless you want something that acts like a mouse) (but is bad, because we don't even know how to put any kind of structure in it), and we still don't understand it (which is bad, because we can't use it to do anything useful, nor can we mass-produce it once somebody has been able to splot out something that actually does something useful).
Sure, there probably are "interesting emergent properties" in cultures of nerve-cells. But don't expect a hybrot to take over the world in the next weeks... Actually, I'm more interested in the work in transforming them into this particular quote from the article: "Currently, Steven DeWeerth, professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, is using Potter's findings to build actual circuits in silicon, although this work is still preliminary.". Now, that could maybe lead us somewhere where we get a better understanding of how neurons combine to do stuff...