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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."
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.
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
...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...
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.
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
Hybrid fuel technology meet hybrid car driver.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Because you're not wearing the funny buckethat. Get a funny hat and we'll totally believe you. Really.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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
?
and everyone laughed when i said the veritech from macross/robotech would happen one day...
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
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!
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!
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
and reminds you that there is an ongoing chicken holocaust worldwide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead
Why is this modded troll? This guy played in G'f'n'R for a while. Actually, it's the first thing that I though of too when I saw the word "bucket".
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
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
Control the house, the mobility device, you name it.
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.