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NASA Controls Jet With Nerve Signals
__roo writes: "According to this press release, NASA scientists were able to control a 757 jumbo jet simulation using neurolectric machine control -- muscle-nerve signals fed to a computer, which used a neural net to learn how to interpret the signals. The first prototype armband was made from exercise tights, and used metallic dress-buttons as dry electrodes. This page has high resolution photos of the device."
What story are you referring to?
is Firefox
"But you must THINK. . . in Russian."
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Good luck with it.
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Controlling a device with an arm muscle is far different from "mind tapping". The brain is extremely complex, and the chances that we'll be able to decode nuron firings specific enough to identify complex commands is not likely without some type of embedded device. Plus, every brain is different which only adds to the problem. Right now we can "read" emotions via the electrical signals in the brain, but this equivalent to using the clapper to control devices. Its cool, but I highly doubt it'll get to the point where you can think "up" or "down" and a device could read it.
how is someone else going to *easily* take control of the aircraft
Offhand, I'd suggest that every crewer capable of flying the plane would be fitted with their own "neural device" prior to take off, with either the onboard computer calibrated for each pilot, or a calibration-on-a-chip type of thing, where the pilots neural patterns are stored in the armband, and activated when plugged in. Then it would be a simple matter of plugging the lead from the "device" into the computer, flicking a switch and away you go.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
neural net should be able to distinguish.
It's the should part that I find scary. I've done some work with neural nets. Machine learning is not like other stuff you've worked with. It is not deterministic. You can't say with 100% accuracy that any non-trivial output is correct. Neural nets just don't work that way. Straight C code can at least be understood, even if exhaustive proof of correctness is beyond most Q&A department. Very few people can understand even the simplest neual net.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Nope, it says just what its supposed to. It does make sense. Think about it.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
It would be different if the device could read nerve signals that do not correspond to muscle movements, but that does not appear to be the case.
There would be many disadvantages to using non-muscular impulses. On the not-so-serious side, what if the pilot has a vision of the plane crashing? That would suck. But by using muscular impulses, the pilot need not learn anything new. In addition, he/she would have greater control over the airplane. Also, accidents would be greatly reduced due to the fact that there are fewer mechanical devices. The neural net learns your motions, so any excessive movement would be cancelled-out by the computer. It can also re-learn if parts of the plane become disabled.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Isn't the problem (and benefit) with neural networks, that they are somewhat non-deterministic? I mean, it's all well and great if 99% of the time the plane behaves correctly according to its training, but what about that 1% of the time where some rogue neuron determins that the pilot *really* means to do a 180?
And what if, say, a stewardess given the pilot his coffee bumps him, and causes the plane to spiral out of the control? There is something to be said for good old fashioned mechanical controls.
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Well, it's kind of absurd to argue about something this far off, but it seems to me that everyone would know the same things, to the extent that now, everyone has access to the same things on the Web. But there's a difference between having access to the text of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and fulling understand all of its implications. That's why I said that I think humanity will focus on understanding and mastering. So society can still be stratified-- by how quickly understanding comes to each person.
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Cochlear ear implants already exist that interface directly to nerves. This removes the requirements for muscle movement, so mass doesn't need to be accelerated, so the bandwidth should be higher than normal humans' typing rates.
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Well, it appears that they've programmed the computer to only respond to input if the pilot has curled his hand into a fist. So it is possible for the pilot to "let go", just as they would release their grip on a real stick before moving their hand.
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And yes, neurons in the CNS are a little different than ones in the PNS. But not enough to make a difference, especially once you've put electrodes into them, because they both use the sodium/potassium/etc. ions for electrical signalling.
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I don't get it.
MSK
Nah, it'd never happen.
MSK
One thing that the story didn't talk about, but would probably be useful - does the interface provide any feedback to the pilot (aside from the plane dipping & rolling, of course)?
Electrical or sonic stimulation for instance? Feedback would bring the user "into the neural net", and would probably assist in learning how to use the interface & speeding up the user's reactions quite a bit!
The crash of their neural net based interface :P
Yeah, luckily they edited those scenes out of "Top Gun"... :)
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"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Intellimouse, schmellimouse! I want electrodes hooked up to my USB port, dammit!
But above all the question is: Who will volunteer to port this to 2.4.2??
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Oh, and one more thing... a "jumbo jet" is a 747. Despite the higher number, a 757 is relatively dinky. Single-aisle, and all.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
That sort of thing makes the FAA very unhappy. Not to mention the airline, since the guys can't fly until they test clean...
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Maybe they passed it through the Brunching Shuttlecocks sarcasticizer
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
People with degenerative muscle conditions can benefit from this technology as it removes the physical barriers from controlling devices.
On another note.....
Ever played a flight or driving sim. Remember how bad you were to start off with? The feedback level from the joystick/wheel is a poor substitute for the real thing.
When driving or riding I use the sensations I receive back through the wheel or bars to correct my driving/riding/flying.
So how remote of a sensation would flying a plane be if you lose this link? The PR talks about the system being used without any tactile feedback.
So to compensate would a pilot be best grabbing a joystick, whether real or not, and using this as a tactile prop.
And then we are back to square one.... joystick/yoke control :)
On virtual reality:
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Hmm, another of Arthur Clarke's visions come true? The brain cap? Will it also help detect the seeds of criminal behavior and alert the authorities before it manifests itself? I like Clarke's stuff, but I would rather die than wear a brain cap.
Steven
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Your sig says:
"Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
But that doesn't make sense (nor is it funny as a joke). I think you meant 'distinguishable'... right?
"And like that
It's an entirely new interface, and is not limited by the older constraints of older interfaces.
Meaning that, unlike a cheap Power Glove, you are not limited to the degrees of freedom that your fingers and hand have. If you want to tap the muscular controls of your entire body, you can. If you want to tap into the muscles of just your arm, you can. If you just want the hand, you can. So it is already a superset of the powerglove. It would also mean that you aren't limited to on/off switches, but also the more analog like nature of muscle response over time and signal strength.
What use can the complex neural net have? Why not do an analogy?
We have fly by wire systems in which a computer device controls an aircraft and multiple control surfaces in ways and at rates that humans cannot, because there is too much information too process.
Not lets switch the direction of logic; you have a human controller, with much more sensitive and flexible control points than a Power Glove or joystick can sense. The neural net would allow one to almost directly map the human musculature to the airplane control surface, allowing both more control and higher reliability, without reducing flexibility or increasing complexity. It's not perfect, of course, but it's conceivable that all one needs to do is don a light slave suit and control a plane in the same way one would control rollerblades or skis; muscle control!
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A car currently only allows for two/three degrees of freedom, what with the accelerator/brake and steering.
The proper analogy is if we use the muscles to actually control/dictate the ABS system, the 4 wheel independent suspension (anticipating speedbumps and potholes with active control), and 4 wheel drive.
Geek dating!
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Resistance is futile.
I wouldn't predict 'direct neural tapping' to be as mindblowing as you suggest.
If we all have our brains wired up to computers, they can perhaps become extensions of ourselves, the way a watch, a shoe, a sword can become an extension of a person.
But that does not mean we can become extensions of each other. People with quick and adaptable brains, in the neuro-plasticity sense, and not the smart and gifted sense, might be able to quickly learn how to communicate with each other, any more than two people from the same school speaking the same language are extensions of each other.
One would *still* have to interpret each person, the same way we interpret our vision, our sounds, our smells, our reality. We gain one more sensory organ, perhaps, but that's about it. We'd probably have to invent a synchronization language to allow ourselves to taste our SO's ice cream, but it still wouldn't mean *we* would be tasting it. It would probably still route it through our own taste centers, just that our two different taste centers may start to synchronize more.
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I'm not sure. Remembering the halcyon days of 8-bit BBC Microcomputers, I remember we had some kind of thing set up where you could influence a point on the screen from a couple of electrodes taped to your skin. I don't think it was quite the same technology, but it did work to a degree. Details are foggy because I was only about 11 years old at the time ;-)
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I've said it before, and i'll say it again. New technology goes strait to porn... :)
Even the pictures on the site suggest it... notice the hands...
Hey, this reminds me of that research project at (stanford?) a few years ago where they hooked some rig up to a guy's head and his brainwaves moved the mouse around.
No telling if they ever figured out how to click (or distinguish between right/left click, mousewheel, 3rd button, etc), but imagine the frag potential....
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
ZAP!!! Turbulence sucks!
Seriously, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. How would you like to drive your car with no feedback at all? Holding on to an "air" steering wheel means that you have no feel for what the parts actually doing the work - the tires - are doing. What if there is a steering failure and the tires (or rudder) won't turn? How will you know? By looking at a display? Great, add that to the thousand other control items you have to look at in a cockpit.
We are just now getting to the point where fly/drive/control-by-wire systems are providing the necessary amount of feedback to the user to allow the user to gather the same information that was available in analog systems all along.
I think that this will be a great technology, but only if there is a compatible means of providing feedback to the user. All of the references to this type of technology in SF have always included force feedback as part of the equation.
This is incredible.
This is one step closer to the concept in sci-fi type stories where the vehicle is just an extension of your body. The plane/ship/space-vehicle/car just reacts to commands straight from your brain and eventually you get so used to the commands that it's just like using your own body. I know all the fears that a situation like that poses, but think of how cool it would be. Drag races with reaction times lower than ever thought possible simply because you don't have to wait for the signal to go from eye to brain to nerve, to muscle, to vehicle device, to vehicle drive. Instead it would go from eye to brain to vehicle and go!
Yeah, I know there would be better and more important ways to use it (think of dog-fights in the air or space with vehicles that are mind controlled), but drag-racing is in my family.;-).
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Which makes me jittery...
Which gets picked up by the controller
Which makes the plane shake
Which makes me MORE nervous...oh what vicious cycle!
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I can't belive I'm the only Anne McCaffery fan here. Surely someone else must remember Helva, Simon, and Tia. Here we are getting closer to the day when cripples can scout around the universe and noone remembers Science Fiction has perdicted it.
um - little known fact:
(would YOU publicise this?)
Fighter pilots on long (8hr+) missions have been known to wear adult diapers.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
By definition, all theory is not "real". Macross plus had some interesting theories.
I am a bit confused on the moderation, 3? This comment is not relevant to the story at all.
One of the elements of the show is that there is a design competition between two designs, the YF-19 and the YF-21. One of the things that the YF-21 design had going for it was that it had an interface similar to the one mentioned in the story. The main difference is that the YF-21's interface didn't require the pilot to actually move any part of his body. He could simply "visualize" the whole aircraft as an extension of his body, and control it that way.Another thing worth mentioning, there was a scene where the YF-21's pilot visualized an easy way to kill the YF-19's pilot given the current circumstance. The YF-21's computer system took this as an order, and they YF-19's pilot was almost killed. This illustrates a potential danger in these kind of systems that the designers and/or users will have to be weary of.
I wonder if people who haven't learned to integrate their activities with a machine at an early age will ever manage to have this happen as seemlessly as you suggest. The people who invent this stuff may end up using this stuff rather awkwardly, like someone speaking a late-learned language, while their children will truly be the ones that inhabit a new world.
For some reason, I find the whole concept of this rather unsettling. I guess I don't like the idea of becoming overly dependant on a machine. What if the power goes out?
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I am curious if anybody knows how hobbyist friendly this field is. It looks like the physical hardware needed to pick up these signals isn't much, but i can imagine you need some _REALLY SPIFFY_ (read expensive, large, current-hungry, heat dissipating...) amplifiers to make this sort of thing work, and then some really spiffy algorythms on the computer side to filter out noise that gets picked up, plus whatever low-level chatter is happening on that nerve...
So here is my question: Does anybody that knows something in this field know of a source of information on this? Is the technology patented by somebody? How complex are the electronics, and are the algorythms for extracting the data public?
The reason i ask is because i've always wanted to be able to do this, now i don't want to land jets, or play quake, i have a much more modest application in mind, i'd like to be able to get several (as few as four would still kick ass, although up to 10 would be nice...) reproducable (you don't have to be able to reproduce them from memory, there will be a visual feedback mechanism, so you know what you are inputting now, and you can watch it change as you "move"). I don't really have a practical use for this, and i'm sure i'll _always_ be able to type faster than i can use this method, but i still think it's very cool.
So i guess if it's something i could concievable do for under $1000 assumming i already had microcontroller tools, a scope, prototyping tools, etc... (so i'm talking only parts, books, software that must be purchased, and oddball tools...)
Thanks, and i really hope i hear from somebody, because this has sort of been a dream of mine since i was about 12 years old =:-)
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Control a Jumbo jet with nerve impulses...
Stewardess bends over to pick somthing up, pilot gets a woodie, and plane goes into a nose dive!
:-(
Course.. the pilot could start playing with himself.... watch that plane go up and down, up and down.... :)
more recently I saw a product hyped up to "read your mind" you placed your finger on something, and was able to move a plane just by "thinking" about it. when in reality you we're subconsciously moving your finger the way you wanted to go, this kind trick is common in other applications.
The use of a neural net however is quite good. neural nets are currently used in speech recognition, and writing recognition. basically you say "here's some data, it means A", "here's some other data, it means B". the neural net will be able to tell the two apart and allow for a good degree of error. this is the jitz of it, I'm not really a student of the field.
so it makes sense to use a neural net for a task of "these muscles patterns mean move left", and so forth. I'm just surprised I didn't hear about that success of such an application till they landed a freakin jet with it! but then again slashdot is eregular about there coverage of things, i imagine cmdrtaco and gang turned down the previous articals leading up to this one.
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
- tokengeekgrrl
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions
As for actual piloting or other safety-critical applications, though, I have to admit skepticism. Anything where fidgeting could actually result in death should probably be discouraged.
OK,
- B
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http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
I have a few concerns with that type of control: 1. What about muscle spasms or craps. Plus what if you need to "stretch" those muscles a minute? Do you now have to require co-pilots in every aircraft (course commercial aviation requires this anyhow)? 2. Hypothetically. If the pilots are incapicitated, how is someone else going to *easily* take control of the aircraft. Oooopss wait while I strap on some electrodes... oh nevermind there's the ground.
This new technology is significant in that neuroelectric control of computers can replace computer keyboards, mice and joysticks for some uses
It's been stated flippantly by some other posters, but I really seriously hope none of these uses include safety-critical applications, either for the user or for the user's "clients" of whatever sort. The example of an airline pilot is a good one--is it really smart to think that a pilot will be able to keep his hand under *complete* control for the duration of a 4 hour cross country flight? Much less the much longer intercontinental flights? Can you imagine the difficulty of keeping your arm completely still during the period of stable flight? I suppose it wouldn't be *that* hard to cut in and out with the autopilot, but still....
Furthermore, one advantage sticks etc. have is they don't require you to be physically tethered to the control system. If a pilot today has some medical emergency, not only does the copilot have his/her own stick, but the pilot could be removed and any other person capable of flying the machine could very quickly take over. How long would it take 1) to move the electrodes and 2) train the neural net for another person?
This really does not seem like it would be a good technology for any kind of control system where you have human failsafes to protect safety.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
"I'll bet you $100 that I can, too land a plane with both hands behind my back!"
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Sheesh - the use of quotes in that article would make Dr. Evil proud:
...ability to control and "land" a simulated 757...
...control an aircraft without the aid of a "stick"...
...a simulated "damaged" aircraft...
Scientists outfitted a "pilot" with an armband...
Hmmm... a little over doing it? Do you need to put the word "pilot" in quotes (well, I did just then, but then I needed to, because... Oh, forget it.
OK first of all, there's a huge difference between what NASA does research on, and what the FAA approves. The FAA is a very conservative, safety-oriented organisation, and avoids change as much as possible. If this thing was put into fighter production tomorrow, it would be a decade before civil planes saw such a device.
Secondly, let's look at what this is: a fundamentally new way of controlling a plane with the same old movements. It's exciting and innovative, but effectively the pilot is still flying in the same manner as he did before, although without a joystick in his hand. Fly-by-wire systems and positional sensors offer the same capability.
Ultimately though, this is the thin edge of the wedge. Make no mistake--this will lead to entirely new ways of interfacing with machines of all types, and may be the start of true virtual reality. (like the transistor was the start of the modern portable computer) This isn't a device - it's a technology.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
All the time, he wonders when NASA will learn to convert to and from the English and SI system.
You know, this whole idea sucked really bad the first time when it was called a POWER GLOVE.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
The Anime Geeks will note that one of the Valkyrie fighter jets/mecha in the Macross Plus series was controlled via electrodes and biofeedback.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The consequences of direct neural tapping are mind blowing, and in more than one sense. One question is that when everyone has their brains wired up to this tech and to the internet, everyone becomes educationally equal, and everyone can learn new skills very quickly. This technology is a step in the direction of a classless society.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
Can you imagine the pilot having too much coffee?
"Sorry folks for that wee bit of turbulence. I drank an extra cup of coffee today and I'm a little jittery"
Probably going to be the first plane crash due too caffiene.
Er, no. This is about muscular nerves. Picking out eight myoelectrical signals through (several?) cm of meat is no mean feat, but distinguishing what's going on in millions of ganglia through a skull? And that's merely considering the scale difference; I dimly recall the idea that muscular nerves were qualitatively different than the ones which we think with.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
It would be just like walking... at first, interacting with the computer pack would be awkward, but after a while you'd do it without thinking, and it would become a part of you.
Just as the avilablility of an always-on DSL connection allows people to use mapquest rather than storing an atlas at their house, this technology will allow humans to forget the millions of trivial facts and focus on understanding and mastering skills.
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