The Cyborgs Are Coming!

The cyborgs are coming, indeed. If scientists in the emerging field of neurobiological robotics have their way cyborgs may soon become something real and not just something out of science fiction. At present, robots are excellent at computational tasks, deciphering public transportation schedules and beating the best at chess but they have electronic issues with walking, talking and understanding “everyday objects.”

Those in the field are focusing on determining which individualistic human and/or animal abilities they can copy, convert to software and replicate in order to create what could one day be cyborgs. Experts from across the globe will soon be presenting numerous “works-in-progress” this week in Hong Kong, China at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

The cyborgs are coming!/Image: CyborgPhotos

Jeff Krichmar, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, California said: “We’re trying to make the robot brain more like human brain. The brain has incredibly flexibility and adaptability. If you look at any artificial system, it’s far more brittle than biology.”

He hopes to one day even construct “neurotic robots” who exhibit signs obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). To meet this goal Krichmar will have to build a cyborg that acts “like a mouse in a cage.” He states: “If you put a rodent in a room that is open and unfamiliar, it will hug the walls.”

Krichmar continues: “It will hide until it becomes comfortable, then it will move across the room. It will wait until if feels comfortable. We did that with a robot and made it so it was so anxious it would never cross the room.”

Krichmar and his co-workers utilize a mouse model and different amounts of serotonin and dopamine. These are both hormones that have a strong effect on the brain’s pleasure centers. They record then reproduce the chemical effects on the rodent in the robot’s software.

Krichmar concluded: “We’re mimicking the action of the chemicals with equations. We are doing mathematical models of brain or cognitive system, then putting that in software and it becomes the controller for the robot.”

The Cyborgs Are Coming!