Monkeys take their robot-wielding powers international
By Donald Melanson 
posted Nov 27th 2007 1:17PM
posted Nov 27th 2007 1:17PM
It's been a while since we've heard from the folks at Duke University and their robot-controlling monkeys, but it seems that they've remained hard at work on their potentially perilous collaboration, with them recently showing off some of their latest tricks at the Neuroscience 2007 conference earlier this month. This time, they had the monkeys control a pair of robot legs through the use of some electrodes implanted in their brains which, apparently, went off without a hitch. But that's not all! The legs the monkeys were controlling just so happened to be located at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan, which the monkeys were linked to via the Internet. No word on what they plan to attempt next, although taking the robots and/or monkeys into space would seem to be the next logical step (at least to us).[Photo courtesy of NASA-JSC / Wikimedia Commons]
Do they fling their own poo as well? I for one welcome our Robot-Monkey overlords...
Super Robot Monkey Team: Hyperforce Go!
Robots don't poo, silly!
So now we can send monkey-controlled robots into space?
...I mean wouldn't it make more sense to make a pair of arms bang those cymbals together remotely?
Transformers: Beast Wars RL.
Internet connectivity via electrodes in the brain? Does that sound like the perfect situation to anyone else?
Doom?
Is that monkey wearing a sanitary towel? Eww! Bad monkey! Bad monkey!
It appears to be some sort of large, chain mail sandwich. Possibly so the monkey can't order the robotic legs to pull ticks off it's own back? I'm just guessing here.
I wonder what a popup would feel like...
It would probably give muscle spasms. Every time you get a pop up, you slap yourself. ;)
Smart monkeys, like in Planet of the apes. We should be careful with this.
er, the monkeys could not see the legs and had no idea what was going on (presuming they were conscious). Was this what they signed up for?
Who is it that is strapping our genetic cousins onto operating tables for this nonsense?
This isn't nonsense to paraplegic patients that hope to one day walk again.
No, LASERS, you fools!!! LASERS is the next step!!!
Soon, very soon, an unstoppable horde of robotic laser-equipped monkeys will be poised to unleash electric death at my command... and then they'll pay. They'll ALL pay!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAaaaa!!!
You know, if I ever DO become a parapalegic, the last thing I'm going to trust my cyber-legs to is some goddamned third-party contracted monkey sitting in a cubicle in Bangalore munching on bananas and playing "spank the robot".
Umm .. surely the idea is that YOU would be the monkey (ie have electrodes controlling robotic legs)
Its Mr. Peanut-monkey!!!
but can it do the robot?
"hey, I look just like Mr. Peanut - umm, I mean, bow down to your robotic monkey overlords, puny humans!"
Monkey Hate Clean!
Anybody who ever read youtube comments knows they had monkeys connected to the internet for quite a while now.
monkey robots?? hmm
A picture of Kyoto end:
http://www.asahi.com/science/update/0115/OSK200801150077.html?ref=rss
(This website usually pulls out free articles after a couple of weeks.)