The human-machine interface is moving along quite nicely. Todays news featured articles on research being carried out by researchers at the University of Washington’s Laboratory for Neural Systems, where they’ve managed to control a humanoid robot by brain signals.

The user wears an external cap embedded with 32 electrodes which pick up brain signals from the scalp. This technology is called electroencephalography (tonguebender). The user watches the robot on screens showing the feed of two cameras, one mounted above the robot and one on the robot itself.

Here’s an excerpt about the technology (from a Science Daily article):

“One of the important things about this demonstration is that we’re using a ‘noisy’ brain signal to control the robot,” Rao says. “The technique for picking up brain signals is non-invasive, but that means we can only obtain brain signals indirectly from sensors on the surface of the head, and not where they are generated deep in the brain. As a result, the user can only generate high-level commands such as indicating which object to pick up or which location to go to, and the robot needs to be autonomous enough to be able to execute such commands.”

The instructions which can be carried out in this manner are limited, but quite impressive none the less; the user can make the robot go forward, pick up one of two available objects and move it to one of two seperate locations. See video here (flash, ad) or here (.avi, no ad).

It seems to me that the robot they are using is a modified HOAP-2 robot from Fujitsu (HOAP3 is the latest version).

See some HOAP-2 movies here.

Also, see this monkey that controls a robotic hand via surgically implanted electrodes, here, here and here (old news).

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