Walk through caves, over bridges, across streets, a white rat carrying a “backpack” is executing its task of finding a photo with the portrait of Tom Cruise on a sand table. The rat has poor eyesight, but to execute the task, it uses the “machine vision” that is “grafted” in its brain.

"The vision of the computer supplements the rat’s own eyesight, and we call the rat a ‘visual enhancement rat’. The mode of integrating machine intelligence and biological intelligence is named as ‘Hybrid Intelligence’." Wu Zhaohui, project manager of national “973 Project” “Computational theory and methodology of perception and cognition for brain-machine integration” and professor of Zhejiang University School of Computer Science introduced that, it is not only the latest achievement of their cooperation with the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) project team of Qiushi Academy for advanced studies, but also an exploratory step in the study of hybrid intelligent robots.

On the sand table, the white rat seems could understand the road signs and has accurately found the target photographs. Thanks to the “help” of computer, which instructed the white rat to read signs and take the next step. In the “backpack”, there’s a brain-computer interface unit which is connected with the rat brain for brain-computer communication and a pinhole camera functions as eyes of the rat. The scenes “seen” by the white rat are transmitted via wireless signals. Then the computer will make use of the machine vision technology of artificial intelligence to automatically analyze and recognize the objects in the image and plan for the strategy of next movement based on the current status of the rat, and transmit back the strategy to the white rat via wireless signals.

In the field of artificial intelligence, Brain-Computer Integration (BCI) is an important trend of development. Wu Zhaohui introduced that the research group put forward the concept of “hybrid intelligence” internationally for the first time three years ago, to integrate biological intelligence and machine intelligence and turn it into a completely new intelligence system, which has become a new direction of development of artificial intelligence. “The example of visual enhancement rats stands for an exploratory step in this field, indicating that machine intelligence and biological intelligence can be integrated not only in the signal level but also in higher information level.”

Member of the research group and Professor of School of Computer Science, Pang Gang said that the integration of biological perception and cognitive capability and machine computing is expected to generate a more intelligent form than the existing systems. The exploration is expected to provide research ideas for neurological rehabilitation and animal robotics and to have broad application prospects in the field of disability rehabilitation, disaster rescue, national defense and etc.