Neural Control: Getting an American Cockroach to Drive a Car is an idea originated not by an animal researcher out to prove the intelligence of insects, but by a Virginia Tech electrical engineering senior who wants someday to help provide increased mobility for the severely handicapped.
It is an idea that propelled Steven Bathiche to tie for first place in the undergraduate paper category at this 1997's annual student research symposium at the university.
"The connection of the living to the non-living - the interface between humans and machines - has been a recurring theme in the works of futurists ..." Bathiche writes in his project abstract. "The merging of the tools of engineering with the principles of biology may bring these fictions to a reality."
When Bathiche came up with the idea of testing the ability of muscle action to control the motion of a vehicle, he decided to use insect muscle. "I wanted insects for this research because they are built simply compared to mammals," he says. So he asked Jeff Bloomquist, an associate professor of entomology, to help.
"Steve came to me and asked if it was possible to use an insect as the control for an electric car," Bloomquist says. "One of my areas of research is insect neurophysiology. He designed the circuit board and I helped connect the board to the cockroach." They chose the American cockroach for its robustness and large size.
Bathiche and Bloomquist tethered a cockroach to a boom extending from the front of a toy remote-controlled car. They attached a thin-wire recording electrode to the insect's thoracic flight muscles. When the cockroach moves its muscles in an attempt to fly, the electrode delivers an electrical signal to an amplifier and filter. The signal is fed to a Motorola microcontroller, which measures the signal and drives the motor of the car forward via an electronic speed control.
"The exciting thing is that the concept actually works and it has some potential real-world applications," says Bloomquist. "Steve's interest is in interfacing handicapped people with intelligent wheelchairs. This is a first step toward that."
A human-machine interface could be accomplished by attaching surface electrodes to the wheelchair user's head or by placing electrodes just under the skin, Bathiche explains.
Bathiche graduated from Virginia Tech in May ('97) and worked as a summer intern at Microsoft in Seattle. He is going to the University of Washington to work on a Ph.D. in bioengineering. "I want to conduct similar research there," he says. "Applications from this research could include electric wheelchairs that can be controlled by severely handicapped people. Beyond that, I can imagine humans and computers interfacing, based on the same principles we've applied to the cockroach and the electric car."
Update: Steven Bathiche has been an inventor in the applied research group in the Microsoft Hardware division since 1999. He obtained a BS in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and an MS in Bioengineering from the University of Washington. While in Graduate school he developed the Mothmobile, a hybrid robot that uses an insect as its control system via a neural electrical interface. He is the inventor of the Microsoft Freestyle Pro game pad, a gaming device that employs inertial sensors to deliver 4-degrees of freedom in control. Steve’s current work focuses on creating new computer classes that push the boundaries of human to machine interaction; focusing on new form factors, novel sensing techniques and interactions, mobile computing, and cutting edge display technology. He has numerous patents.
— Written by Liz Crumbley