LIVING ROBOTS
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007A group of Chinese scientists from the University of Science and Technology of Shandong has succeeded for the first time in directing by remote control the flight of a pigeon. The work team, part of the Center for Technological Research of the Robotic Engineering Department of that university, developed an electronic technology that had already been used with mice to implant a series of micro-electrodes n the bird’s brain, through which they stimulated different zones of the brain. In this way, they forced it to fly to the left or the right, up or down, according to the whim of the remote control. According to the specialists who participated in the experiment, the electronic impulses simulated the signals generated by the brain to control the movements of the bird’s body, so that it obeyed them as if they were coming from its own brain. This is the first experiment of this type that has been applied successfully to a pigeon. The objective is to “improve the mechanism” in order to “apply it in the future in a more practical form,” although no one has yet specified what that may be. In fact, this initiative is pretty disturbing when we consider that the micro-electrodes could be implanted in a human being.
EFE (Spanish news agency) News – February 2007
