unmanned aircraft like what you re looking at, can have some serious advantages over those with pilots on board. in terms of acrobat i cans i think it would be hard to beat what a robot can do. the neuromuscular system in the human body, may be delays on the order of 80 millly seconds or 200 mill seconds in response to seconds you can see. robots can do computations hundreds of times a second. so the delays are a order of a millisecond or papers perhaps even less. heather: amazing technology. we have a robotics expert and professor at the university of pennsylvania school of engineering and applied science. thank you for joining us. thank you for having me. heather: the nova special makes a point pointing out this technology is just in its infancy. where is it headed? that s correct. it is just starting. what we re doing is creating robots very different from the remotely piloted vehicle that you see, what you read
without help. i was ecstatic. i had feelings of hope and a great sense of independence. the key to the technology is this tiny sensor dwarfed even by a five pence piece. it s implanted on the surface of the brain in an area known as the motor cortex. when the patient thinks about moving their arm, neurons in the brain are activated and these electrical signals are picked up by the sensor and sent to a computer which turns them into commands. and these are what those signals from the brain look like when directing the drink to the patient s lips. it was really a moment where we helped somebody do something that they had wished to do for many years. reporter: this tiny sensor was inserted into the arm of this robotics expert from reading a decade ago as part of an earlier trial. it enabled him to control a robotic claw. he says the technology could give independence to paralyzed patients. this will allow people to do things for themselves.
i was ecstatic. i had feelings of hope and a great sense of independence. the key to the technology is this tiny sensor dwarfed even by a five pence piece. it s implanted on the surface of the brain in the motor cortex. when the patient thinks about moving their arm, neurons in the brain are activated and these electrical signals are picked up by the sensor and sent to a computer which turns them into commands. and these are what those signals from the brain look like when directing the drink to the patient s lips. it was really a moment where we helped somebody do something that they had wished to do for many years. reporter: this tiny sensor was inserted into the arm of this robotics expert from reading a decade ago as part of an earlier trial. it enabled him to control a robotic claw. he says the technology could give independence to paralyzed patients. this will allow people to do
represent in mathematics and recreate you can build other versions are. really our white a program our soul is our program in a hundred years we will know how to upload peoples minds into computers because scientists really on course to one knocking the mysteries of the human brain in a way that will enable them to build one just like it one day. our journey begins an inside one man s imagination she roshi ishiguro who was a science fiction fan and robotics expert who s exploring what it takes to be human