The fusion of neuroscience and robotics for augmenting human capabilities

Objective

The ultimate objective of the NEUROBOTICS project is very ambitious, yet clear and well defined: 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.

The scientific, technological and cultural environment in Europe is mature to face this challenge, whose impact in engineering and medicine could be comparable to that recognized to "big science" projects. NEUROBOTICS will systematically explore the area of Hybrid Bionic Systems (HBSs) and will deeply investigate the theme of human augmentation. Starting from the most advanced state of the art in neuroscience, NEUROBOTICS will aim at developing new integrated robotic artefacts, as much biomorphic as required to be effectively interfaced with 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. NEUROBOTICS will provide general answers on how the field of human augmentation can be approached with methods, tools, and aims that have a solid scientific foundation, keeping into account the ethical and societal perspective.

The "heritage" of NEUROBOTICS will be the kernel of a new community of European researchers, with strong links to non-European top scientists (e.g. in US and Japan), able to dominate the scientific, technical, industrial, societal and ethical aspects of this novel discipline and to exploit it to the benefit of the EU citizens.

Programme(s)

• FP6-IST - Information Society Technologies: thematic priority under the specific programme "Integrating and strengthening the European research area" (2002-2006).

Topic(s)

• IST-2002-2.3.4.2 - FET pro-actives

Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (16)