Lucy and friend
Skinless
A scan of a small part of Lucy's brain
Top-centre is the view through her eye (of a test pattern). Top-left is the activity produced by that pattern on V1. Bottom-right is the synaptic wiring of a fragment of V1.
Lucy learning about lines and edges
She could have learned about edges just by looking around at the world (like we do) but a test pattern produces repeatable results
The three muscle 'pairs' in Lucy's arm
Conventional rdio controlled model servos. These were only barely powerful enough and quite noisy. Trying to solve these 'simple' mechanical problems in Lucy II has taken months.
Another view of her innards
Lucy's one good eye
The other was going to become a webcam but we never got round to it. Lucy II has two eyes with much better control.
The view through Lucy's eye
It's a miracle she could see anything in such a low resolution image!
Some of the film crew from Equinox
They shadowed us for about 18 months for a Channel Four documentary. Not a scrap of science made it into the program...
Lucy with all her fur on
We abandoned the fur eventually - people prefer to see the mechanics inside
One of Lucy's pre-processor boards
Four of these were linked together with some share memory into a parallel processing cluster.
The stack of pre-processors
She had one for each of: vision, hearing, voice and muscles/proprioception
You need small fingers to do electronics these days!
Lucy's pre-processors were very fiddly to solder by hand. Her circuit boards were hand-made (Ann etched them on our Aga). Lucy II's chips are even fiddlier, but now we have better equipment.
Lucy's school nativity play
(wishful thinking for a few years yet!)