Robot With Digital Neurons Explores How Brains Adapt To Change

This robot (its name is CARL) may not look especially biological (aside from the adorable little ears), but inside, it’s thinking with a computerized model of a rodent brain and interacting with the world through a “biologically plausible nervous system.” The programming for the rodent brain comes from brain recordings of real rats, and when CARL’s brain learns to replicate the behaviors of those rats, researchers hope that they can analyze what CARL’s brain is doing to make inferences about how biological brains work. Specially, CARL (and the real rats) are put in situations where the locations of stimuli that predict food rewards change abruptly, so CARL and the rats have to quickly learn how to adapt. It’s this capacity adaptation that we don’t really understand on the neuronal level, and in addition to offering insights into human behavior, it’s hoped that the research will lead to robots that are better able to decide what to do complicated and changing environments.

[ UC Irvine ] VIA [ RobotBuzz (Translated) ]

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