These legless and unsmiling women have been outfitted with high-tech prostheses by the cheerful Americans and then taught to dance in uniform, Rockettes-style.
To do this, researcher have been studying individual regions of the brain and developing "brain prostheses" and "neural interfaces".
Unlike other materials, this self-organised hybrid based on carbon nanotubes (thin sheets of carbon atoms rolled up into microscopic cylinders) is ideally suited as a chemical- and abrasion-resistant coating for spacecraft or as hip prostheses in the body.
Can someone opt to replace their healthy limbs with robotic prostheses?Questions such as these are difficult to anticipate.
Other commercial organisations involved in this burgeoning field are the Swiss company K-Team (which developed the robot used by the Georgia Tech group) and a German firm called Multi Channel Systems (which developed the multi-electrode array dishes and amplifier used by the group).But before neural prostheses hit the market, numerous technical and ethical issues have to be dealt with.
Rather, he believes that in the foreseeable future these prostheses are going to be special purpose, mostly peripheral devices such as the retinal prostheses being developed at Stanford University, or the "bionic eye" at the University of Southern California.
As they describe in their paper, Max Ortiz-Catalan of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and his colleagues hope to rectify this by combining implanted electrodes with a state-of-the-art prosthetic-limb-mounting system.Standard prostheses are held in place by a compression socket, which squeezes the artificial limb onto the stump of the natural one.
The Stanford team's work has important implications for advances in brain prostheses.
Modern prostheses are able, by reading electrical signals from muscles using electrodes attached to the skin of the missing limb's stump, to perform tasks such as picking things up.
The major funder of the Paul Klee Centre, Maurice Müller (a local orthopaedic surgeon who made his fortune by inventing hip prostheses) met the architect when he replaced a hip for one of Mr Piano's friends, Maurizio Pollini, a pianist.
That is an important suggestion when the term "robot" covers such a diversity of devices, from medical equipment to drones and vacuum cleaners.Stringent product-safety rules, for example, might discourage development of advanced prostheses and exoskeletons, a set of technologies that the European Union is keen to support.
