Building Robots to Understand Brains

Posted 19 Mar 2005 at 23:49 UTC by steve

An article in The Online Engineer describes the work of Tony Prescott and other researchers at the Sheffield University Department of Psychology. In an attempt to better understand vertebrate brains, they are designing and building control systems for multitasking robots. The work involves computational modellers, neuroscientists, and neurobiologists in the Department's Adaptive Behaviour Research Group. Their initial goal is to build robots based on reverse-engineered rat brains. They hope that an understanding of rat brains will eventually lead to an understanding of the human brain.

Building Brains for Robots, posted 20 Mar 2005 at 02:25 UTC by AI4U » (Observer)

Bottom-up approaches take forever. Once we have a competent theory of mind, we may enjoy the luxury of a top-down approach such as found in Mind.Forth for robots -- with its User Manual that invites roboticists to link from a PC running Mind.Forth across a serial or parallel port into the motorium actuators and sensorium sensors of a robot.