Robotic Nation Evidence

A new word is entering the vocabulary: Neurobotics. It means: ’The Fusion of Neuroscience and Robotics for Augmenting Human Capabilities’.

For example, see this article: IST-FET launches Integrated Project:’Neurobotics’

From the article:

The ultimate objective of the NEUROBOTICS project is to introduce a discontinuity in the robot design, thus going literally "Beyond Robotics". This discontinuity will be pursued by a strategic alliance between Neuroscience and Robotics, which will go well beyond present, mostly fragmented, collaborations, and lead to overcome state-of-the-art of robotics worldwide.

More particularly Neurobotics aims at:
1) systematically exploring the area of Hybrid Bionic Systems (HBSs)
2) deeply investigating the theme of human augmentation
3) developing new integrated robotic artefacts, as much biomorphic as required to be effectively interfaced with the human body and brain

Three robotic platforms featuring different levels of hybridness (i.e. mechanical coupling with the human body) and of connectivity (to the human nervous system) will be developed to be used in experiments on human augmentation: biomimetic scalable artefacts to be remotely controlled by human operator; intelligent wearable artefacts loosely physically coupled with the human body; arm-hand sub-systems tightly physically coupled with the human body.

Let's hope that Vertebrane and body-free living are on the menu.