Cyborg Cockroach Controlled By Phone

Next time you happen across an enormous cockroach, check to see whether it’s got a backpack on. Then look for the person controlling its movements with a phone. The RoboRoach has arrived.

The RoboRoach is a system created by University of Michigan grads who have backgrounds in neuroscience, Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo. They came up with the cyborg roach idea as part of an effort to show students what real brain spiking activity looks like using off-the-shelf electronics.

Essentially the RoboRoach involves taking a real live cockroach, putting it under anesthesia and placing wires in its antenna. Then the cockroach is outfitted with a special lightweight little backpack Gage and Marzullo developed that sends pulses to the antenna, causing the neurons to fire and the roach to think there’s a wall on one side. So it turns. The backpack connects to a phone via Bluetooth, enabling a human user to steer the cockroach through an app.

Why? Why would anyone do this? ”We want to create neural interfaces that the general public can use,” the scientists say in a video. “Typically, to understand how these hardware devices and biological interfaces work, you’d have to go to graduate school in a neuro-engineering lab.” They added that the product is a learning tool, not a toy, and through it they hope to start a neuro-revolution.

Currently the duo’s Backyard Brains startup is raising money through a Kickstarter campaign to develop more fine-tuned prototypes, make them more affordable, and extend battery life. The startup says it will make the RoboRoach hardware by hand in an Ann Arbor hacker space.

This week the RoboRoach project was presented at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, and stirred up a bit of controversy. Although the RoboRoach creators say the stimulation doesn’t shock or harm the cockroach, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals told the BBC it has concerns about the technology. The neuroscientists’ opinion that the process doesn’t impose pain isn’t enough for the group.

Living in New York City, I battled plenty of cockroach invaders, including the large kind required for RoboRoach. So I can’t really be impartial in this particular ethical debate. But if teachers want to use cockroaches to show kids how the brain works, that sounds OK by me. It’s only when the insects become cyborgs on their own that we’d really have to worry.

Gloves Turn Gestures Into Speech

Most hearing people can't understand sign language. A team of students from  the Ukraine built a set of electronic gloves to help bridge that gap. A set of sensors in these gloves, including an accelerometer, compass,  gyroscope and flex sensors in the fingers, translate movement into  signals that a computer converts into speech.

The person wearing the gloves draws a shape in the air. That information is transmitted them via Bluetooth to a  smartphone, which matches the shape up against a set stored in memory. A match produces a sound. For example, waving one's hands in  one pattern produces "nice to meet you" and another pattern produces  "system really works."

ExoHand Boosts Strength, Transmits Touch

Imagine a remotely operated robot hand that imitates the movements of an operator exactly -- picking up objects and manipulating them, perhaps in environments too dangerous for people to work in. Or an exoskeleton that prevents repetitive stress injury.

The ExoHand, from Festo, a German company, may one day do just that. It's an exoskeletal system designed to provide greater strength and dexterity to the user, showcased at a recent trade show in Hanover.

External actuators boost the grip strength of the wearer, and a software algorithm controls the position of the joints. And the ExoHand can do more than make a person's grip strong -- it can also transmit the motions of the wearer in real time to a robot, with a silicone hand fitted where a human one would ordinarily be.

One thing the ExoHand has is feedback -- the operator gets a sense of the pressure exerted on the object grasped. That makes remote operation a lot more precise -- one has a "feel" for the object that isn't there with traditional remote-controlled robot graspers.

Though it is still inthe proof-of-concept stage, it's a big improvement on the claws or mechanical graspers common in robotics and automated systems, as it duplicates the movements of fingers and can grab things more delicately. It's also better than a traditional glove box for handling objects that might be dangerous where more room is needed to operate.

The ExoHand might one day be used in factories where people do repetitive tasks -- by assisting the wearer it reduces the strain on muscles. It could also show up in physical therapy, not unlike the Ekso, an exoskeleton designed for paraplegics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcTL7Hig8h4&feature=player_embedded

ExoHand Boosts Strength, Transmits Touch

Imagine a remotely operated robot hand that imitates the movements of an operator exactly -- picking up objects and manipulating them, perhaps in environments too dangerous for people to work in. Or an exoskeleton that prevents repetitive stress injury.

The ExoHand, from Festo, a German company, may one day do just that. It's an exoskeletal system designed to provide greater strength and dexterity to the user, showcased at a recent trade show in Hanover.

External actuators boost the grip strength of the wearer, and a software algorithm controls the position of the joints. And the ExoHand can do more than make a person's grip strong -- it can also transmit the motions of the wearer in real time to a robot, with a silicone hand fitted where a human one would ordinarily be.

One thing the ExoHand has is feedback -- the operator gets a sense of the pressure exerted on the object grasped. That makes remote operation a lot more precise -- one has a "feel" for the object that isn't there with traditional remote-controlled robot graspers.

Though it is still inthe proof-of-concept stage, it's a big improvement on the claws or mechanical graspers common in robotics and automated systems, as it duplicates the movements of fingers and can grab things more delicately. It's also better than a traditional glove box for handling objects that might be dangerous where more room is needed to operate.

The ExoHand might one day be used in factories where people do repetitive tasks -- by assisting the wearer it reduces the strain on muscles. It could also show up in physical therapy, not unlike the Ekso, an exoskeleton designed for paraplegics.