Perhaps I was a bit hasty when I suggested that in the future, cows will be herded by autonomous robot helicopters. Or rather, I wasn’t being optimistic enough about the progress of cybernetics. The USDA and MIT have teamed up to create a cow monitoring and control system that’s basically a glorified iPod, complete with a “doughnut-shaped stereo headset worn over each ear” by the cow. The cowPods are actually better than their human counterparts in several ways: they’re solar powered, have integrated WiFi and GPS, and even come with magnetometers and accelerometers to “record the body orientation and configuration and the animal.”

The way the cowPod works is with simple positive and negative reinforcement. To round up the cows, the cowPods play “familiar “gathering songs” sung by cowboys during manual round-ups,” which I guess they associate with herding, although for me, cowboy music would be more negative stimulation. If the cows wander outside of a designated GPS area, the cowPods can play annoying or irritating music in one ear or another to direct them back to where they’re supposed to be, or (if necessary) deliver mild electric shocks.

It sounds like it could be an effective system if the cows decide to pay attention to it and can tolerate wearing headphones. I assume some serious research is going to have to be done to figure out what exactly cows prefer when it comes to grazing music… Since Mozart increases milk production, that might be a good place to start.

[ USDA ] VIA [ io9 ]

It may not be quite as slick looking (or as sinister) as the Cyberdyne exoskeleton, but Berkeley Bionics’ lower body exoskeleton is firmly off the drawing board and into the prototype stage, and you can preorder one for yourself to help kick your status as a 98 pound weakling. The HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) is able to take up to 200 pounds of load off of your back, augmenting your muscle movements so that you feel as though you’re not carrying anything at all. If you want to go anywhere, it’s still going to take some work to move that extra mass, but the HULC will also help to decrease the metabolic cost of moving a load by 10-15%, which means that you can move more heavier stuff farther.

There aren’t any more details on the Berkeley Bionics website (no price, for example) and the promo video looks like the target users are military rather than civilian. It could be that Berkeley Bionics is just looking to sell some prototype HULC systems to raise a little bit of money, but who cares, now is your big chance to start working on that superhero (or supervillain) cyborg suit you’ve been fantasizing about.

[ Berkeley Bionics ] VIA [ IEEE ]

In February, we learned about Dean Kamen’s amazing Luke robotic prosthetic arm, which is way, way, way better than the current standard for prosthetic limbs. It looks like DEKA has put more than a little work into the arm system since then, focusing on what is probably the trickiest (and most important) aspect: how the user interacts with and controls the system.

The arm itself has 18 degrees of freedom, which is nearly as many as a human arm has. That’s a lot of control, which is great, but it becomes that much harder for the arm to be controlled. For most people, sensors on the arm read muscle signals from neurons in the upper body to determine what the user wants the arm to do. DEKA’s system adapts the arm to the user, rather than vice versa, and also allows for the use of macros to make common or repetitive tasks easier to accomplish. DEKA is also working on arms controlled directly with the brain, and part of the above video shows just how effective such an approach can be, as a man uses his mind to lift a cup to his mouth and take a drink, and then sets the cup down again without conscious thought. Simply incredible.

[ DEKA @ D6 ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

Never underestimate the brain power of a hungry monkey. Neurological engineers at the University of Pittsburgh have been able to train two macaque monkeys to feed themselves with a robotic arm wired directly into their brain, marking the first time a a brain-controlled limb has done anything more than demonstrate a proof of concept. Researchers first trained the monkeys to operate the arm with a joysick, and watched what was going on in their brains while they did it. The monkeys then had their arms restrained, and electrodes attached to a group of about 100 cells in the motor cortex part of the brain interpreted the signals the monkeys were sending to their biological arm, and used them to control the robotic arm.

The process took some practice, but the monkeys figured it out in only a few weeks, achieving success rates of over 60%. The robotic arm isn’t simple, either, with both shoulder and elbow joints and a grasping hand. One monkey was even able to scarf down treats and control the arm and the same time, even directing the arm around objects or compensating when the researchers moved the food. Currently, this particular system requires all kinds of infrastructure (computers, technicians, etc) to get it to work, but in principle this concept should be transferable to humans.

VIA [ New Scientist ]