Monkey Think, Robot Do

Computerworld - Earlier this year, brain signals from an owl monkey in a North Carolina laboratory were transmitted over the Internet to Massachusetts, where the impulses were used to manipulate a robot arm.
That long reach by one small primate, the result of work done by a collaboration of neurobiologists and computer scientists, may signal dramatic possibilities for the human/ machine interface.
One primary goal of Miguel Nicolelis, an associate professor of neurobiology at Duke University; Mandayam Srinivasan, director of the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics at MIT; John Chapin, a researcher at the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn; and their teams is to develop technology that will enable people to control prosthetic devices with their minds and the aid of some computational device. Their work may also have wider application, giving embedded processing an entirely new meaning.
"It was an amazing sight to see the robot in my lab move, knowing that it was being driven by signals from a monkey brain at Duke," said Srinivasan. "It was as if the monkey had a 600-mile-long virtual arm."
In the experiment, electrical signals were picked up by arrays of as many as 96 tiny electrodes implanted in the cerebral cortexes of the two monkeys. The signals were processed to find signatures representing the initiation of movement. As the transmitted signals were detected in real time, 3-D instructions were given to a robotic arm to move accordingly.
When the instructions were sent over the Internet from Duke to MIT, despite the possibility for packet delay, the robotic arm faithfully produced the correct motions.
Trained Monkeys
For two years, the owl monkeys had been trained to reproduce small reaching tasks so that their brain activity during specific motions could be studied and a variety of predictive algorithms examined. A simple, linear algorithm was found to work as well as more complicated ones. By using a weighted average of the number of impulses measured by each electrode over the previous second, Nicolelis' team was able to find characteristic signatures for the initiation of motion.
Continually updating their averages and the weights used to produce them, the team was able to correctly predict the speed and direction of the monkeys' arms.
Nicolelis and his team were surprised by their results. "We found two amazing things," said Nicolelis. "One is that the brain signals denoting hand trajectory show up simultaneously in all the cortical areas we measured."
That means that not only the motor cortex, which is thought to be mostly