During his recent interview, Dr. Thomas Otis mentioned a video much like this one where robots were playing soccer. He said:
On one hand it’s really amazing because the robots are out on their own. They have to see the ball on their own and they have to move around on their won. There’s not somebody tapping on a keyboard wirelessly controlling a robot. But when you watch the robots play soccer (and I coach my son’s soccer team) it’s quite funny because the ball goes by them and they’ll turn around and fall over and they’ll have to get up slowly. On the one had the future’s bright for robots because they’re gonna have faster feedback and not need a cerebellum. But we’re still not quite there yet.
He continued to talk about the electrical signals in biology and the electrical signals in robots. Electricity in a wire can go much faster than the electricity in your nervous system. So in a robot, there is more space for a feedback loop to correct motion. With biology, feedback would be much too slow. By the time the signal came to the brain saying a correction is needed, it would be too late to send the correction back. It is the cerebellum, the brain area Dr. Otis studies, the helps us keep movements smooth and accurate.
You can listen to the full interview on iTunes.