Deep Currents

Here’s a video segment from the New Yorker conference that’s well worth watching. Let’s say you’ve lost a hand. Or a leg. Or you’re paralyzed. In five or ten years,go talk to Yoky Matsuoka at U. of Washington and she’ll fix you up with a robotic limb that responds to your thoughts. Alik Widge, I am so glad you’re working on this. Her video clips of the technology her team has created in the lab are quite amazing. In one, a monkey with a chip implanted in its brain uses a robotic arm to take food from a researcher’s hand. In another, you see a person move their finger in all directions while a robotic finger mimics its movement almost perfectly. Finally she shows you the whole hand her team has crafted, anatomically correct and with a flexible palm unlike any other created to date, with the same bone structure and range of motion as our own. This field of “neurobotics” is really taking off.

Written: May 16th, 2008