Cyborg Rats vs. Rescue Robots posted by aisling to cyborgapplication… bookmark this

(Via del.icio.us/tag/cyborg.)

John K. Chapin’s LabThe brain works through the joint action of large networks of neurons, yet traditional neurophysiological investigations typically sample from only one neuron at a time. The major focus of the lab has been to develop and utilize techniques for simultaneously recording the activity of large numbers of neurons in the brain of awake behaving animals. Use of these techniques to detect signals coded by populations of neurons will be important not only for elucidating mechanisms of brain function, and for alleviating medical problems such as paralysis. Since this sort of work may also guide development of intelligent machines it is being used to provide data for computer simulations of brain activity.
Rats’ brain waves could find trapped peoplRats equipped with radios that transmit their brainwaves could soon be helping to locate earthquake survivors buried in the wreckage of collapsed buildings.
Rats have an exquisitely sensitive sense of smell and can crawl just about anywhere. This combination makes them ideal candidates for sniffing out buried survivors. For that, the animals need to be taught to home in on people, and they must also signal their position to rescuers on the surface.
In a project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Linda and Ray Hermer-Vazquez of the University of Florida in Gainesville have worked out a way to achieve this.
First the researchers identified the neural signals rats generate when they have found a scent that they are looking for. “When a dog is sniffing a bomb, he makes a unique movement that the handler recognises,� says John Chapin, a neuroscientist at the State University of New York in Brooklyn who is collaborating on the project. “Instead of the rat making a conditioned response, we pick up the response immediately from the brain.�

[tags]robot,animal,brain[/tags]