Robots capable of reading human thoughts will appear sooner than you think

Today's robots are extremely popular and they are getting smarter.

However, it will take some time for new robots to respond to all our voice commands. And until then, perhaps we will have to use our minds to communicate with them.

You don't misread: you will be able to control robots with your mind in the future , when MIT has just studied a way to combine brain waves with hand movements , allowing people to interact with machines in a way simple.

The idea here is to allow machines to easily correlate and translate a person's brain signals and hand movements, and turn them into robot actions. As a result, people will not need to have super programming skills to reprogram robots that perform specific tasks in direct response to human interaction.

The technology is still in its infancy and requires users to have some rather complicated devices that measure the electrical activity in the brain and muscle activity of the hand. That's how robots read our minds and muscle movements.

But MIT's Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory (CSAIL) was quite successful.

Picture 1 of Robots capable of reading human thoughts will appear sooner than you think
In the future, we can control robots with thoughts.

"This combines electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromechanical (EMG) feedback, allowing natural interaction between humans and robots to perform far more applications than when using EEG alone" - Director CSAIL Daniela Rus said - "By adding muscular feedback, we can use manipulation to control more robot activities in a more specific and diverse way."

Picture 2 of Robots capable of reading human thoughts will appear sooner than you think
This robot chose the object with accuracy increased from 70% to 97%.

The team is led by Dr. Joseph DelPreto, using a humanoid robot called Baxter produced by Rethink Robotics, and part of a project funded by Boeing.

This robot chose the object with accuracy increased from 70% to 97%. Although robots can translate EEG and EMG to activate actions, but only when combining the two, everything becomes possible.


Control the robot with your mind.

"By looking at both muscle and brain signals, we can begin to recognize natural gestures with their quick decisions about whether something is wrong or not" - DelPreto says - "That helps turn communication with a robot similar to communicating with another person".

This system can be used in the future by many different types of people, including those with disabilities or limitations in mobility, and older people as well. Perhaps, how can this robot control method be used for space exploration someday?