Showing posts with label Cyborg Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cyborg Technology. Show all posts

Friday 30 September 2011

Powering a Cyborg Beetle Without Batteries

There’s a lot of research right now being devoted to the creation of robots that are the size of insects. Those robots would be used for surveillance and monitoring – to both good and bad uses, no doubt. However, as you might imagine, the engineering issues involved in such small robots are pretty daunting. As a result, some teams have decided to skip the building robot bugs, and are instead working on using bugs themselves. Basically, they’re making cyborg bugs, with neural implants so that the bugs can be controlled from a distance.
One issue with this system, apart from the fact that the existence of cyborg insects is probably going to give you horrifying nightmares for the rest of your life, is the problem of powering the implants. Currently most proposed systems and experiments have simply used batteries. But as you might imagine, the weight and limited lifespan of batteries can pose some difficult challenges.
However, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Micromechaanics and Microengineering, a team of researchers from the Universities of Michigan and Utah may have found a solution. The researchers, who are working with DARPA’s HI-MEMS program, have developed a prototype that allows the implants of cyborg beetles to draw power from the beat of the beetle’s wings.
The researchers created two piezoelectric energy harvesters, one attached to each wing. Piezoelectric energy is the charge that develops in certain materials, including proteins, when they’re moving mechanically. In this case, the energy comes from the beating of the beetle’s wings.  Using the harvesters on the wings, the researchers were able to draw out over 45 micro-watts of electricity per insect. Given some refinements in design, they estimate it may be possible to convert enough energy such that the harvesters alone would be sufficient to power all of the implants in the cyborg beetle.
In the meantime, if you find yourself having a nightmare about cyborg insects hunting you down, just remember that for now at least, they have batteries. And those batteries will die.

Cyborg Plants Won't Let You Kill Them

Got any plants or flowers around your home or office that are dead or dying? We all do--at least I do. Forgot to water them. Not enough--or too much--sun. Miracle-Gro? What's that?
If robotics expert Stéphane Magnenat, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and his artist colleague, Aline Veillat, have their way, such floricide and herbicide will be a thing of the past.
Robot, meet Fern.
Magnenat and Veillat, along with some others, have collaborated on a paper called "Towards adaptive robotic green plants," in which they explain the goal of their project: "To lead the general public to a questioning about the role of plants in the society through an artistic installation. We do so by endowing a green plant with motion, perception, learning and adaptation capabilities while retaining the emotional characteristic of a plant, such as calm and gently random behaviours."
What they propose is a cyborg, combining biological and technological elements, based on an iRobot Create, a computer running Linux, a normal plant and some additional sensors. To save itself from murderers--or at least plantslaughterers, such as me--this cyborg will, more or less, live its own life by looking out for its own need for water, sunlight, and--because of the associated electronics--electrical energy. In other words, it can fetch its own water, scuttle to the sunny side of the room, and find the plug into which it can recharge its battery.
Explains the team: "To do so, and in contrast with existing works, the robot employs a well-founded probabilistic planning algorithm. This algorithm takes as input the current state of the cyborg needs, and produces as output a sequence of actions." This simple plant, therefore, can plan what it needs based on "expected fitness values," and then create a "probabilistic model of the effect of actions on needs."
The algorithm will sequence through these actions and estimate the final fitness value. Apparently it cannot kill itself--Praise Be!--for any sequence that would lead it to starvation or peril of any kind is rejected. The sequence resulting in the best fitness value is accepted.
The cyborg plant can currently, using its sensors, avoid obstacles, find the best light source, and stay out from under foot when humans come a callin'. Say the artist and roboticist: "Ultimately, we hope to awake questions about the role of plants in the society, and to highlight their presence as actors in the world."
In my world, then tend to do death scenes very well. "Alas, poor Philodendron! I knew him, Hydrangea."

Behind today’s cyborg technology – reality more closer to fiction than you think

Biomechanics has come a long way during the past few decades, on trend with the exponential growth of CPUs and electronics, in general. Articulated limbs or artificial optic units are just a few of today’s options that individuals with various impairments and disabilities can use to make their lives closer to normal. Limitations exist of course, but they’re only imposed by technology which is constantly growing at an exponential rate.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the most exiting video game to come out in a long time, impressing through gameplay, graphics and story line. The setting of Deus Ex is that of a 2027 dystopian Earth where the world is dominated by corporations and humans are addicted to cyborg components and upgrades provided by them. The cyborgs in the video game Deus Ex, half-human/half machine, are capable of extraordinary things once with they’re new found biomechanical upgrades. But how far are we today from Deus Ex’s extraordinary cyborg concepts?
I’m pretty sure some of you will be extremely surprised by the level of technology and capabilities cybernetic modifications is at in present day. Rob Spence, a present day cyborg and filmmaker known as the Eyeborg, worked with Square Enix to shoot an incredible documentary which references today’s fast paced cyborg industry.
Left without an eye after a dreadful shotgun accident, Spence now has a biomechanical eye implant made. In the documentary, Spence, the perfect host, speaks to other extremely interesting persons who’ve had various modifications. As scientists and engineers work to bring these mechanical modifications to replace the natural missing part, whether it’s a leg, arm, eye, whatever, the temptation to actually bring enhancements and improvements is there. When confronted with the possibility of upgrading your current physical and even intellectual abilities via cybernetic implants, a lot of people might be compelled to opt for them.
The premise is there for a real Deus Ex world in the future, hopefully without the downfalls. Spence explores all these exiting concepts in his documentary, Deus Ex: The Eyeborg


Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary

Scientists test first human cyborg

A British university professor has been fitted with cyborg technology enabling his nervous system to be linked to a computer.
The ground-breaking surgery on Professor Kevin Warwick effectively makes him the world's first cyborg -- part human, part machine.
Although a long way from fictional characters The Terminator or the Six Million Dollar Man, it is hoped that readings will be taken from the implant in his arm of electrical impulses coursing through his nerves.
These signals, encoding movements like wiggling fingers and feelings like shock and pain, will be transmitted to a computer and recorded for the first time.
Similar experiments have previously only ever been carried out on cats and monkeys in the United States.
Surgeons implanted a silicon square about 3mm wide into an incision in Warwick's left wrist and attached its 100 electrodes, each as thin as a hair, into the median nerve.
Connecting wires were fed under the skin of the forearm and out from a skin puncture and the wounds were sewn up.
The wires will be linked to a transmitter/receiver device to relay nerve messages to a computer by radio signal.
It is possible that the procedure could lead to a medical breakthrough for people paralysed by spinal cord damage, such as Superman actor Christopher Reeve.
On Friday, Warwick, 48, denied claims that the surgery, which was carried out at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, England, was just a publicity stunt.
"To go through a two-hour operation I would say is a little bit extreme for a publicity stunt," he told the BBC.
"To say no you can't do this or this is publicity is absolutely crazy at this stage when we haven't even looked at it."
He said the 500,000 ($715,000) experiment was about "seriously helping people" with spinal injuries.
He added: "This has not been done on a human before so for someone to say this is not going to tell us much ... we don't know.
"We really don't know but we want to find out what sort of signals we are going to get and what sort of signals we can put in."
Researchers at the university's department of cybernetics will carry out experiments on Warwick for about a month.
He said: "What we're doing is historic and momentous. It is going to change the world.
"Science fiction has predicted this for quite some time. As a scientist, I'm excited about taking a step into the future.
"But as a human I do share the ethical concerns about what it will mean for humanity."
Warwick also hopes to wire himself up to a ultrasonic sensor, used by robots to navigate around objects, to give himself a bat-like sixth sense.
He believes the technique could be developed within a decade to restore movement to a tetraplegic's hand or feeling to a prosthetic leg used by an amputee.
"For someone like Christopher Reeve, it might not bring back complex movement. But if it could allow him to control a bit of technology to pick up a cup, it would be enormously useful," he said.
Warwick has already been a guinea pig for his own experiments.
In 1998 a silicon chip, which turned on lights and opened doors when he walked into his office, was implanted in his arm.

The Cyborg Soldier: Future/Present

Soldiers Future/Present: Popular Images Troops

Wars do make men. And not just real wars. Possible wars, imagined wars,
even unthinkable wars shape men—and women. Just as modern war required
modern soldiers, postmodern war needs soldiers with new military virtues
who can meet the incredible requirements of high-tech war. These new
soldiers are molded, in part, by personnel science and marketing analysis in
uneasy alliance with traditional military discipline and community. But in
another sense it is the weapons themselves that are constructing the U.S.
soldier of today and tomorrow.
Weapons have always played an important role in war, from the gear of
the Greek hoplite to the tankers of the world wars. Today, however, it is not
that the soldier is influenced by the weapons used; now he or she is
(re)constructed and (re)programmed to fit integrally into weapon systems.
The basic currency of war, the human body, is the site of these modifications,
whether it is of the "wetware" (the mind and hormones), the "software"
(habits, skills, disciplines), or the "hardware" (the physical body). To overcome
the limitations of yesterday's soldier, as well as the limitations of
automation as such, the military is moving toward a more subtle man-machine
integration: a cybernetic organism (cyborg) model of the soldier that
combines machine-like endurance with a redefined human intellect subordinated
to the overall weapon system.
Current DoD policy is creating a postmodern army of war machines,
war managers, and robotized warriors. Logistics command sees the soldier
as a digitalized "manprint," as Major General Wallace C. Arnold explains
(1995). For him the key issue is the soldier-information interface.
The ideal postmodern enlisted soldier is either an actual machine (information
processing) or will be made to act like one through the
psychotechnologies of drugs, discipline, and management. The ideal
postmodern officer is a skilled professional who manages weapon systems
and sometimes applies them in combat. In all cases soldiers are to be
intimately connected with computers through hard wiring, lasers, and
more traditional soldier-machine interfaces.
That is why in North America the cozy often comical images from
modern war of U.S. (Kilroys, dogfaces, G.I. Joes) and Commonwealth
(wisecracking Tommys, soft-spoken Canucks, loud Anzacs, and silent Gurkhas)
soldiers from World War II (Combat, Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy)
have been shattered. In film portrayals of the first postmodern war, Vietnam,
multiethnic teams of clean-cut born-in-America guys (The Green Berets)
coexist with men trapped in an insoluble moral dilemma (Deerhunter,
Platoon) or even inside of Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam War means Vietnam
protests (Coming Home, Fields of Stone), as even the charmed circle of
all-American guys (Tour of Duty) must recognize. The first TV show about
Vietnam, M*A*S*H, was set in Korea during that conflict, but it was always,
psychologically and ideologically, about Vietnam. It was one of the most
successful TV shows ever in the United States, and it still plays out its ironic
antiwar message every day in syndication. Its dark humor is copied by some
(Good Morning Vietnam), and its feminine healing focus by others (China
Beach)] but it remains unique, marking as it does in the mass media the
critique of modern war first elaborated by the poet veterans of World War I
and then by the novelist veterans of World War II.1
As the reasons for war have become less clear, the moral standing of the
participants has also become very confusing to some of us. "Bad guys" and
"good guys" (which translate as "us" and "them" or "friend" and "foe" in the
jargon of counter terrorist experts, police, and the military) are harder to keep
separate when one compares:
• Stateless terrorists and state terrorists
• "Right Stuff' astronauts ("one giant step for mankind") and "TopGun" pilots (killing Mu'ammar Gadhafi s four-year-old daughter with
a smart bomb)
• Jedi Knights (modeled on the Vietcong according to filmmaker
George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars), the nickname given the war
planning staff of General Schwarzkopf's Gulf War command (Gordon
and Trainor, 1995, p. 126), and Rambo (a Nam vet whose first movie
is all about killing policemen)
• Fat Pentagon officers smoking cigars with briefcases full of money (as
shown in countless political cartoons), and naive soldier-engineers
(Jimmy Carter)
• Losing superpower soldiers riding their tanks and helicopters out of
Afghanistan and Vietnam, and the winners
• Good cyborgs (Robocop, D.A.R.Y.L., and hundreds of cartoon and
sci-fi characters) and bad cyborgs (The Terminator and more hundreds
of cartoon and sci-fi characters), often in the same movie (Terminator
IlRobocopU)
• Elite U.S. soldiers invading countries (Grenada, Panama), training
death squads (Latin America), killing civilians with high-tech weapons
(Persian Gulf, Libya), and as victims of terrorism (Marines in
Beirut, woman soldier in Germany, black sailor on hijacked plane,
Scud victims in Saudi Arabia)
• Boring, nerdy war researchers (as characterized in David Broad's book
Star Warriors) and Dr. Strangelove scientists
G.I. Joe is now a TV character who fights more battles with transformers
(robots that can turn into cars and planes) and dinosaurs than any normal
human enemies. Almost all of the violent children's cartoons involve cyborgs
and other strange mixes of the human, the beastly, the alien, and the
technological. Some shows allow the kids at home to join in the fight as well
by using expensive interactive toys. In just the last four years of the 1980s
the main war cartoons included (with their toy companies in bold and their
TV network or producer in small capitals: the interactive Captain Power and
the Soldiers of the Future (Mattel); interactive Photon (MCA-Universal); interactive
TechForce (Axlon); Inhumanoids (Hasbro); Centurions: Power Xtreme
(Kenner); G.I. Joe (Hasbro); Challenge of the Gobots (Tonka); Transformers
(Hasbro); Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, CBS); Rambo: Force of Freedom
(Coleco); Star Wars: Droids (Kenner, ABC); She-Ra, Princess of Power (Mattel);
Thundercats (MCA-Universal); Jaycee and the Wheeled Warriors (Mattel);
Superpowers (Marvel Comics, ABC); Voltron (Matchbox); Lazer Tag (Worlds
of Wonder, NBC); Star Wars: Ewoks (Kenner, ABC); Silverhawks (Kenner);
HeMan & Masters of the Universe (Mattel); Robotech (Matchbox); Dinosaucers
and Dinoriders (Legos).2
Postmodern war is as disjointed as the cartoons, even if it does lack
dinosaurs. It is both the extrapolation of modem war motifs and weaponsinto their reductio ad absurdum and their unabsurd opposite images. So the
atomic bomb and the computer, the two great military brainchildren of
World War II, become nuclear overkill facing hijackers armed with handguns
and the electronic battlefield is overrun (and undermined) by the agrarian
Vietnamese. And, as alluded to above, the common-man foot soldier has
assumed any number of other identities from a female soldier-tech repairing
a faceless machine to an elite bloody-minded covert action warrior using a
satellite to call in a killer droid.
In important ways the spies and spymasters of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies have to be considered the precursors, and the comrades, of
today's soldiers, especially the elite (counter)terrorist troops and commandos
of the Marines and Delta Force. Since the 1950s the CIA has tried to use drugs,
electricity, and hypnotism to turn some intelligence agents, their own and the
opposition's, into functional robots. As one CIA psychologist put it, "The problem
of every intelligence operation is how do you remove the human element'*
(quoted in Marks, 1979, p. 49). Just exactly how successful these attempts have
been is impossible to find out, but several clear trends are obvious:
1. The replacement of most human intelligence collected by agents
with signal and satellite data
2. The widespread experimentation on the use of drugs and hypnosis
to create amnesia and to facilitate the reprogramming of agents
3. The use of direct electrical implants (bioelectronics) to control
behavior
CIA experiments on many animals, including monkeys, dogs, cats,
crows, and various reptiles (among others), certainly took place and may
well be continuing. A CIA document from April 1961 admits that the
CIA had a "production capability" in direct electrical brain simulation
and that they were "close to having debugged a prototype system whereby
dogs can be guided along specific courses." Less than a year later another
CIA report claimed that "the feasibility of remote control of activities
in several species of animals has been demonstrated." It went on to
promise that "investigations and evaluations" would be aimed at applying
"these techniques to man." What the CIA has managed to develop
in the almost three decades since these reports is not public knowledge
but research continued for at least ten years and possibly to this day
(Marks, 1979, pp. 209-211).

What's a Cyborg?

The thing you need to understand about “cyborg” is that it was coined in the 60s.

So when it comes to the version of cyborgs that you’re probably most familiar with, the chromed man-machine monsters – your Terminators, Robocops, and Ghosts in the Shell – that’s from later on. It’s not how cyborgs start out.

They start out like this.
This is the era of Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson. This is the era of acid, Agent Orange, and DDT. It’s the era of Dow and DuPont. We’re talking about “better living through chemistry” and drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs.

It’s also the era of the Cold War and the Space Race. The word is coined in 1960. NASA is not yet two years old. Sputnik is not yet three. Kennedy is a year away from announcing America’s commitment to putting a man on the moon.
A lot of people were getting together and asking, “How can we survive for the long term in space?”
One solution is architectural.

Using the latest construction techniques, you can build a little bubble of earth, and plunk it down on any old alien world. We can send people off to these environments and so long as the walls don’t burst and the air doesn’t run out, they’ve got all the comforts of home.
A pair of scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, had a different idea.

“What if we could just live in space?” they asked, “What if instead of adapting the environment to ourselves, we adapted ourselves to the environment?”
To do that, they reasoned, you need a cybernetic feedback system to maintain homeostasis unconsciously. These systems need to become a part of the organism. A cybernetic organism. A Cyborg.
The key notion here is non-hereditary adaptation. Technological interventions that change the course of biological existence.

Being that it’s the 60s, these interventions are pretty much all pharmacological.
In their paper entitled Drugs, Space and Cybernetics Clynes and Kline consider a host of solutions. Drugs to keep you awake and effective for days at a time, drugs to put you to sleep for long voyages, drugs to prevent radiation poisoning, drugs to keep you strong in zero gravity. If there’s a problem, drugs will solve it.
There are a few exceptions.

At one point in the paper, they consider nuclear-powered air exchangers to replace your lungs. At another point, they consider yoga and hypnotism as methods to alter and control the metabolism.
So yes, to Clynes and Kline, the people who shop at lululemon are all cyborgs.

Yet the vision of cyborg that’s stuck has been this one.
Brains jacked into computers, bodies invaded by technology, limbs and organs amputated and replaced by machines until the resulting creature is barely recognizable as human (but still very sexy).

I want to present you with a different vision of cyborgs, one that derives in part from the work of feminist theorist Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto.
In it, she argues that we are all and have always been cyborgs, hybrid entities that combine biology, culture, and technology into a single blurry unit. Haraway wants to move away from the essentialist narratives of gender, race, and politics but in doing so, she ends up taking the rest of us along with her.
There has never been a moment when we did not integrate with tools.

Our tools define and shape us, they tell us who we are. We use them to extend our literal selves out into the world. When you get into an accident, you say “she hit me” not “her car hit me” and not “her car hit my car”.
We are embraced and enveloped by the technosphere and even if we try to escape and smash the system, we find we are part of it.

Look at these guys.
Polyester shirts. Glasses. Baseball bat. Shoes. These are entities wholly dependent on non-hereditary adaptation to survive in their environments. No matter how hard they kick the fax machine.
Visions of cyborgs are all about the relationship of technology to the body.
Let’s use some iconic 80s movies to illustrate.

There is the body-terror of the Terminator, an entity that is machine first, with a thin veneer of humanity sprayed on top. Infiltrator assassins sent by a technosphere that’s decided it doesn’t need us anymore, that behaves and looks like us long enough to get close enough to kill us.

Then there’s the body-tragedy of Robocop, a person that should be dead, kept alive and made more powerful by technology. He’s made more vulnerable too. He is wholly dependent on the infrastructure that sustains him, and his will is constrained by the programming. His techno-corporate creators have failsafes and kill switches. His humanity seems always to be just slipping out of reach.

Or consider the body-revulsion of Tron, where the dream is to leave our bodies behind entirely, to upload ourselves to cyberspace and surf the digital universe as pure mind. In this version, our bodies are disposable impediments and superfluous to our true selves.
But bodies aren’t superfluous.
For my money, the vision that gets it most right is Ripley’s exoskeleton.

When she wears it, it becomes a part of her, enhancing her power and abilities. When she needs to, she can take it off again.
Technology upgrades are faster than biology, that’s the point of non-hereditary adaptation. Who has time to go into surgery every time there is a new version of the hardware? The exoskeleton shows us the appeal of non-destructive enhancement.
Consider paralympic athletes.

When they go to competition, they don’t graft the equipment on to their bodies because, next year, there’s going to be better gear. Instead, they wear interchangeable equipment that’s suited to the moment.
We are all only ever a few material or computer science advancements away from permanently implanted enhancements becoming permanently implanted impediments.
Consider Nadya Vessey.

She’s a double-leg amputee and, when she wants to, she becomes a mermaid. This is a fully functional swimming tail, designed by WETA workshop (they did special FX for Lord of the Rings and District 9).
It’s a cosmetic enhancement more than anything else. A beautiful technical marvel of a fantasy ballgown. She’d be a fool to install it permanently. Maybe in a year or two she won’t want to be a mermaid anymore.

So when you think about cyborgs, think less of images like this. Don’t think about total loss of self, bodies encroached and erased by technology, humanity swallowed whole.
Instead think of cellphones.

Think about off-loaded memories, of constantly renewed enhancement and new abilities. But also think about insistent ringtones, and demanding interruptions, think of externally controlled access, and a reliance on a sprawling infrastructure.
We are shaped by the technologies because in integrating them, they become us. And though we can discard or upgrade them, this is no less true of our cultural selves. Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow but those possibilities are shaped and constrained by the biology, culture and technology that is part of you.
Of all the images I’ve shown you, the true cyborg looks most like this.

Look at her, wearable vision enhancements, removable cosmetic implants.
And for all we know, veins coursing with drugs and nanoblood.