“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine
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Researchers at the University of Granada in Spain have developed an artificial cerebellum — really a biologically-inspired adaptive microcircuit — that provides finely tuned motor control for robots that can operate more safely in an environment shared with humans.
University of Grenada research team.
The safety issues arising from shared human/robot environments is a subject we’ve dealt with previously on this page, notably in the posts:
- The Skin We Live In: Skin for Robots, the Mechanics + the Meaning, and
- Robot Sex Week (Part IV): Touch-A Touch-A Touch-A Touch Me, I Wanna Be Dirty.
In related work, an early (1998) thesis on artificial cerebellums by Russell L. Smith (prefaced with a hobbit walking song) can be found in PDF here, with accompanying animations in MPEG format here.
More recently, researchers in Israel implanted an artificial cerebellum in a rat. As reported by New Scientist:
Matti Mintz of Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues have created a synthetic cerebellum which can receive sensory inputs from the brainstem – a region that acts as a conduit for neuronal information from the rest of the body. Their device can interpret these inputs, and send a signal to a different region of the brainstem that prompts motor neurons to execute the appropriate movement.
“It’s proof of concept that we can record information from the brain, analyse it in a way similar to the biological network, and return it to the brain,” says Mintz.
