Successful development of robots that can be controlled by thinking

There are many ways to control robots. You can program, or control with the touch screen or joystick. Robots can also teach themselves new tricks through machine learning technology. But now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (BU) have added another way to control robots, that is Use your brain.

Researchers have created a feedback system that can read the reactions of the human brain when looking at a working robot. If the robot fails, the operator will recognize and the robot will be sent a signal to correct the error. The researchers shared the results of this work in a report published March 6.

Robots can also teach themselves new tricks through machine learning technology.

Nobody pressed a button or said a word

To communicate electronically with a machine, researchers have developed a type of EEG (EEG) for the operator to record brain activity. Then, in real time, the robot receives nerve signals from the operator and can change the way it operates.

The team, headed by MIT's lab director, Daniela Rus and BU's professor, Frank Guenther, found they could discover when someone thought the robot had done wrong by following. Monitoring of brain signals is referred to as "error-related signals" (ErrP) . ErrP was born when we realized a mistake, and then we would emit electronic signals and the EEG hat could be collected, categorized and sent as feedback to the machine. just made a mistake and let it fix it.

If the brain does not send ErrP signals, the robot will continue to do what it was doing before.

In the video, the robot, driven by this "telepathy" , only works in a simple situation with two possible outcomes. But researchers hope that tweaked systems will one day be able to interact in more complex tasks.

This is not the first time researchers have tried to develop brain-controlled robots, but previous efforts require operators to think in a specific way so that the robot can understand. .

"As you can see at the robot, all you need to do is think or agree with what it is doing," Rus said in a statement. "You don't have to train the brain to think in a specific way, the machine will follow your mind, not the other way around."