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Honda Develops Brain Interface For Robot Control
narramissic writes "Honda has released a video of experiments showing a person wearing a large hemispheric scanner on his head and controlling Honda's Asimo robot by visualizing movement. Back in 2006, Honda and ATR researchers managed to get a robotic hand to move by analyzing brain activity using a large MRI scanner. This latest work uses EEG to measure the electrical activity in a person's brain and blood flow within the brain using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to produce data that is then interpreted into control information. While both the EEG and NIRS techniques are established, the analyzing process for the data is new. Honda said the system uses statistical processing of the complex information to distinguish brain activities with high precision without any physical motion."
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--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
While controlling something (robot/UAV) will get easier and easier. The problem I see is getting the Input side working for total control. Combining the technology that is being developed to help the blind and deaf for something like this would be the next great leap.
what happens when the guy thinks of women on the beach?
welcome our new bucket wearing overlords! All hail Lord Bucket!
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
The book Starship Troopers by Henlein had people wearing huge armored suits equipped with nukes, lasers, etc. Perhaps we can just have robot armies controlled by humans mentally.
Or maybe robot miners. And robot deep sea divers. And robot firemen. It doesn't all have to be destruction and chaos to be cool. :-)
"Honda has released a video of experiments."
On a completely unrelated note, I've developed a series of exercises to read slashdot and reply, by pure will. I don't even require a computer.
I present this text as sample of the experiment's result.
Isn't blood flow physical motion?
I wonder what would happen if the subject felt the urge of punching someone, among other things.
This could lead to very strange situations.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Sounds like a spoiler for Sleep Dealer.
Why on earth would these gal-danged scientists create a brain interface for robot control?! The fools have already ensured that the robots will take over our society and force us into slavery. Do they have to make it so easy for them that the robots can just control us directly via our brains?! Are they trying to destroy mankind? These scientists have gone mad!
What's that? Oh... never mind.
The enemies of Democracy are
Who are the biggest WAR CRIMINALS of them all.
Thank you for helping spread freedom and democracy around the world.
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout
...this to lead to humans battling it out in tournaments controlling huge, hundred ton robots.
I better be able to play as a Nova.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Maybe I watch way too much of Futurama/Simpsons/Family Guy/Sci-Fi channel...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I saw this coming. You see these Acuras? See their mugs? God-damn transformers, I'm telling you.
Clearly, this is why the zombies want our brains. They must have already built the robots.
Now I have to learn to think in Japanese as well as Russian.
DRM in your brain. If you get a song stuck in your head you didn't pay royalties for... Not to mention the political implications of this, no more need for torture when you have a Romulan brain probe that can download the information you want out of the person's brain. Or how such technology could be used by a dictator to control the population by punishing unloyal thoughts.
Why is it that slashdot accepts this sort of this as real but laughs at people who are the victims of government psychotronic mind control? I've been plagued with this for years - making me hear voices, making my walls knock, causing my HVAC system to spread knock out gas throughout my apartment that leaves me out for days at a time.
So why is this possible but mind control NOT? Why does no one recognize this?
I'd want a mind control link for driving one of their cars! That way, we could keep our hands free for doing other tasks while driving, like talking on the cell phone, eating, or shaving!
I wonder if it's kick start...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
We will be able to have real Battlemech combats at Solaris IV!
Japanese mechas, pffffft, goddamn candyasses.
-- Sauer
I can't stop thinking about the neural impulse helmet used pilot the mechs when I see this.
and reminds you that there is an ongoing chicken holocaust worldwide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Isn't this a slightly fancier, much more well-funded version of what the "Prototype This" hackers did in a few days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leVLTFy4vXo
(around minute 1) and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6aX2-o92ek
?
Hey what would happen if they used this robotic interface to remotely control the 'remote controlled rat' of a couple of years ago? That might actually be kinda fun when you think about it...plus it might be helpful in fully understanding the complexities of the....rat....race...buhah..buuwhahahaha
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
Sweet! Ars was just covering a story about using carbon nanotubes for artificial muscles, and now we have the neural interface controls we need too. If only ITER would hurry up and get us to the point of developing compact fusion reactors, we'd be all set to go.
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
I own one of these, it's in my desk right now:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826100006
Been out for a while. (Actually I found it via a /. article.)
Seems like the same thing to me?
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/input_devices/ocz_neural_impulse_actuator_nia_-_the_log/1
http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-nia--neural-impulse-actuator-review/
The hitch is that most people still need a brain interface to a better brain.
The guys working with the person wearing the input device, texted a hot babe to come by and just see if the robot spazzes out.
I can see the bumper sticker: Robots do not punch people, people punch people.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Last night's episode of "House" (FOX TV) had a gadget that used EEG to move a cursor so a paralyzed patient could answer yes/no questions. Talk about synchronicity!
Got My mind robot interface got my femisapien let's get ready to rumble!
An immediate application, of course, is prosthetics for lost or damaged limbs.
But if it works out as described, where it's possible to direct additional stuff without interfering with your normal actions, by imagining what you want done and having the device do it, it could be used to control a robot helper or ADDITIONAL artificial limbs.
How many times have people wanted extra hands while soldering, welding, assembling models or appliances, building houses, repairing cars, ...?
Looks like Doctor Octopus may soon be technologically feasible.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Firefox (1982) was about Soviet jet that could (at least in part) take command from the pilot's thought; they just had to think in Russian. Also, if memory servers me correct, there was research being done along this path at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 90s. Nice to see a profit motivated company pursuing this technology.
Sounds messy...
It is interesting to me that this is conveyed as a "robot" controlled by a human interface. It always seemed to me that the field of robotics generally tended to slide towards autonomy, not control by human interface. I would be more likely to dub this an achievement for a cybernetics or biomedical field than a robotics field. Of course, since few people seem to agree on what makes a robot a robot and whether autonomy is a requirement or not, I suppose I could just be picking at words...
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Rather, ambiguity:
Has Honda developed an interface by which brains can control robots, or the other way around?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I was gonna build something like this with some statistical stuff too... Only for computer games. But I worked out it was too expensive, and too dangerous. Looks like Honda beat me and my fantasy hobby project to it. Lol! ;P
What happens to you when you drive past a billboard for the latest Godzilla movie? Scary thought...
Control the house, the mobility device, you name it.
What's next? Controlling robot cars with their brains?!?!
They must be stopped.
If it is controlled by a human, via a joystick or psionic helmet/implant... it is NOT a robot. UAVs are not robots. The "bots" in Robot Wars were not robots, they were RC cars with weapons.
Your car isn't a robot if you are controlling it, directly or remotely. If your car was sensing it's environment and navigating on it's own, then it would be a robot.
Who'da thought Honda would be responsible for building the first Veritech fighters?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
..is that this is Honda, a name brand major manufacturer who are in a position to mass produce things that actually work and are affordable. Sure, random joe nerd youtoober or pick a university project of choice might come up with something spiffy, but when Honda does it, there's at least some hope you might get one, one day.
The example video shows discrimination of 4 available discrete actions. The eventual goal would presumably be to discriminate tens, hundreds, or thousands of actions, if not smoothly varying parameters of action.
There are two main ways to go about this:
1. Train the algorithms processing the brain signals.
2. Train the brain signals.
The best approach is probably to do both in concert using real-time feedback to the user about how the algorithm is currently interpreting the signal. The user can then learn (explicitly or implicitly) what mental processes lead to what action outcomes. In this way the user will learn to control the system in much the same way we learn and constantly relearn how to control our own limbs.
A significant issue will be how good the signal is that can be obtained with EEG and NIRS. Hopefully EEG alone is enough, because while NIRS takes some significant hardware, you could wear an EEG cap around all day pretty easily if you really had to.