I’m sure that by now many of you have seen or read about professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading and his colleagues creating a robot that uses the tissue of rat brains to do the voodoo it do. But if you haven’t here’s a brief synopsis:
Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.
Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday. [...]
Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit — it communicates with its “body” via a Bluetooth radio link. The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.
From the very start, the neurons get busy. “Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,” said Warwick. “Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity” similar to what happens in a normal rat — or human — brain, he added.
I for one welcome our soon to be Ratobot overlords. Just remember my masters, I loved the film Ratatouille.
Tags: Gordon, rat brains, robotics, University of Reading
