Artificial muscle control
I had this idea a while ago, and while I think it would be cool, it's probably not very practical.
Muscle stimulation using external electrodes has been around for almost as long as we've had electricity. Apart from being a cool experiment, it has some uses in rehabilitation, but I won't go there since it leads into the pseudoscience of stimulation weight loss etc.
What I'm interested in fine-grained muscle control. A few years ago some academics wired up a guy's arm to allow a robot to control it. read about it /watch the video here.
What I have in mind is something like this, but more useful. e.g. imagine having a camera on your shoulder, and electrodes on your arm, you could program the system to watch for incoming objects e.g. a ball and move your arm to catch them. or a system to make your legs walk and avoid obstacles so you could read a book while doing walking in the park. etc.
Aside from this system being somewhat cumbersome, the main issues I foresee are:
not enough precision to be useful - i.e. can only give general commands to large areas, so you fall down when trying to walk.
muscle exhaustion - because stimulation is rather imprecise, the muscle uses more energy than normal
I don't think this will ever be useful in the real world, but I think it could be a fun/interesting experiment
(Ideal daydreams: maybe with arrays of implanted electrodes, control could be precise enough to make it useful)
Muscle stimulation using external electrodes has been around for almost as long as we've had electricity. Apart from being a cool experiment, it has some uses in rehabilitation, but I won't go there since it leads into the pseudoscience of stimulation weight loss etc.
What I'm interested in fine-grained muscle control. A few years ago some academics wired up a guy's arm to allow a robot to control it. read about it /watch the video here.
What I have in mind is something like this, but more useful. e.g. imagine having a camera on your shoulder, and electrodes on your arm, you could program the system to watch for incoming objects e.g. a ball and move your arm to catch them. or a system to make your legs walk and avoid obstacles so you could read a book while doing walking in the park. etc.
Aside from this system being somewhat cumbersome, the main issues I foresee are:
not enough precision to be useful - i.e. can only give general commands to large areas, so you fall down when trying to walk.
muscle exhaustion - because stimulation is rather imprecise, the muscle uses more energy than normal
I don't think this will ever be useful in the real world, but I think it could be a fun/interesting experiment
(Ideal daydreams: maybe with arrays of implanted electrodes, control could be precise enough to make it useful)
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short story long: something like catching an object takes a lot more than just a camera and some wires. you can somewhat control the force a muscle is providing. but in order to precisely position your arm you need to have to control the force of many muscles. also the force you need depends on the current position, velocity , the desired speed you want to move the arm with, the arm's mass etc. then you need to build control loops which actually control the muscles force. since your arm does not come with plug-and-play sensors you either have to measure all those by external sensors (or you tap into the nerves providing that data). both is difficult. the actual control loops and kinematic model you need to calculate the forces is another task to solve. if you are up for the task, i recommend to start with a robotic arm where all required data is easier to access.