The fourth meeting on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines (AMAM) took place at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, last week. Automaton contributor John Bender, a postdoc in biology at Case, has the highlights:
AMAM 2008 was a one-week, single-track conference, including four keynotes, over 70 posters, and a "robot zoo" populated by a menagerie of mobile machines. The coffee break buzz indicated that most of the 150 attendees found the meeting to be a superb confluence of the cutting edge in bio-inspired robotics.
Locomotion specialists from both biology and engineering were well represented, and the meeting continually broke down barriers between disciplines to focus on the shining promise of the field: highly functional robots built using biologically derived principles, which in turn serve as embodied models to address otherwise impractical questions in biology. An additional innovation at this conference was the invitation of several biomedical engineers working on ways to recover function in paralyzed human patients using intuitive brain-machine interfaces.
As for the venue, Cleveland may not be the most exotic of destinations but it has an all-American cultural history steeped in the industrial tradition, and during the conference the attendees gathered at Case's sprawling campus were able to experience the city's quite pleasant late-spring weather. And if you're wondering, as many do, the name of the university dates to the 1967 merger of the Case Institute of Technology and the Western Reserve University, with "western reserve" referring to the formerly pristine and resource-rich Great Lakes region of the early 19th century.
Though I didn't see a single uninteresting presentation, I'll highlight just a few that I found especially exciting, in chronological order.
Hunter Peckham, an engineer at Case and executive director of the Cleveland Functional Electrical Stimulation Center, gave a keynote address on some of his recent studies and clinical trials in functional electrical stimulation. This work involves implanting electrodes to deliver electric pulses to the muscles of paralyzed people. Control of a limb is a difficult problem because there are more degrees of freedom (joints and muscles) than there are constraints (desired limb positions). Peckham first simulated the mechanics of the musculoskeletal system to decide which muscles were strictly necessary for a desired range of arm motions, then examined the neural architecture to determine which points should be stimulated to differentially activate those muscles in a useful way. Two patients have received these radio-controlled implants, which are activated by coupling stimulation to recorded activity in muscles which are still under voluntary control. For example, the patient may still be able to twitch his or her cheek, so electrical activity in the cheek muscles would be detected and would be used to trigger stimulation of a particular subset of arm muscles. Two or three co-contracting muscle groups are sufficient for a patient to feed him- or herself, representing a major improvement in quality of life.
Photo: Developed at the Cleveland FES Center, an external controller sends commands to an implanted device that jolts Jennifer French's muscles into action in the correct sequence, allowing her to stand up out of her wheelchair. Read more: Neural Engineering's Image Problem (IEEE Spectrum, April 2004) Photo by Ed Macdonald
Photo: Kanzaki-Takahashi Laboratory
The second full day of talks was sponsored by Mobiligence, a research consortium consisting of engineers and biologists at several Japanese universities. Their backing brought a significant international flavor to the conference. One thought-provoking talk was given by plenary speaker Ryohei Kanzaki, of the University of Tokyo. His research team is investigating the mechanisms by which silkworm moths walk toward the source of an airborne odor. He has built a large anatomical and physiological database of uniquely identifiable neurons in the moth's brain which contribute to its ability to track an odor plume. Using optical recording techniques, Kanzaki can associate activity in these neurons with the presence of an odor. He has built a hybrid robot in order to investigate the algorithm the moth uses to localize the odor source. In this setup, the moth walks in place on top of a trackball, and the output signal of the trackball is used to control the vehicle on which the moth and trackball are sitting. Small fans waft the odor from the floor up to the moth's antennae. This moth-driven robot is capable of localizing an odor source in a manner qualitatively similar to a real moth. Experimentally altering the feedback loop by changing the sign or gain of the coupling between the moth's walking and the robot's movement (and subsequent contact with the odor plume) affects the moth/robot's ability to find the odor source.
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