Visiting neuromorphs tackle biology, technology

By Reilly Capps
Published: Friday, July 8, 2005 11:01 AM CDT
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Timmer Horiuchi hasn't seen the new "Batman" movie. He doesn't need to. He watches his own bat-show every night.

As bats circle around the lamppost in front of the elementary school, he pulls out his "bat-detector," which allows him to hear the normally inaudible sonar shrieks from the mammals as they hone in on and snatch confused moths.

Part of an annual three-week workshop on Neuromorphic engineering in Telluride, Horiuchi is trying to understand the way sonar works in the brain of the bat.

The Neuromorphs, who make Mensa members look like babbling morons, stand at the intersection of neurobiology and technology. Horiuchi, a professor at the University of Maryland, is working with the 60 or so other participants to try and figure out what the two disciplines can learn from each other.

About 30 speakers were invited and about 30 students accepted to the conference. They came from as far away as Shanghai. The scientists spend mornings in lectures and afternoons experimenting, talking, trading ideas.

"Everybody here, it's your life," said Horiuchi. "You get enough people together and you can really make some progress."

There are biologists, robotocists, and computer chip designers at the conference, each exchanging ideas about the way those diverse fields could intersect.

The body's neurological system is incredibly complex, more complicated than any computer every built. But by studying it, the Neuromorphs hope to learn how to build useful devices that "think" more like the deft, adaptive human brain.

In addition, by building robots that function in some small form like the brain, scientists can learn more about the ways the brain works and the ways it doesn't.

"We know some things about the brain, but there's a lot we don't know," said Horiuchi. "The brain is so complex that no one can see the whole thing. But the people from math and physics can bring in different tools" to help biologists understand it.

There are thousands of questions about the brain: Is the brain just one big machine? Does it function in an orderly, predictable fashion that we don't understand yet? Or is it a more of a random thing, a ghost in the machine, more mysterious than can ever be understood?

"So you set up computer that works the way you think [the brain] works," Horiuchi said. "Then you step back and see if it works."

On his desk in room 205 of the elementary school, Horiuchi is building a robot that functions the way he thinks bat sonar works. He's also entering it in a race.

A handful of teams are gearing up for a robot race, to see whose self-propelled, self-directed robot can complete an obstacle course.

The lab is strewn with enough technology to open a COMPUSA. Wires, computers, dials, circuits, beeping and blipping screens. Plus, there're boxes and boxes of Legos, which are handy for robot designing on the cheap.

Joseph Lin, a Ph.D student at the University of Pennsylvania, is building a robot that guides itself by smell. It can detect the scent of alcohol, and Lin is programming the creature to follow that small around hindrances to the end of the course.

Dylan Banks, a student at Imperial College in London, is working with a camera that approximates the retina, registering not only shapes but movement.

Horiuchi will use sonar.

"One of the neat things about sonar is that we have no clue how it works," Horiuchi said. No one knows if bats "see" the world the way we do, with an image in their brain, or if they just get a rough idea of where things are, as if they were feeling around the night sky with a stick. In other words, are they blind like the Daredevil or blind like Stevie Wonder?

Horiuchi's partner at the University of Maryland studies bat brains using electrodes, and has learned that certain neurons fire when sonar shrieks return from a certain distance.

The robot Horiuchi is building has a sonar system mounted on the top, with microphones pointed in different directions, the robot can tell where obstacles are around him, and, hopefully, steer to avoid them.

Getting robots to maneuver on their own using smell, sight, or sonar is a problem at the very forefront of science. And the Neuromorphs are right there, tinkering away at it.