Turn into robots

From Israel, a student used his thoughts to successfully control robots located at Beziers Technical Institute of France.

The dream of reincarnated robots - machines that humans can control like their own bodies - has been around for a long time. In March 2009, scientists at the Honda Research Institute in Japan demonstrated a machine that allowed simple commands to be transmitted through thinking of the intelligent Asimo robot, more than 8 months before the Avatar movie came out. .

More recently, six electromechanical students in the US have launched a 'rice-feeding machine' , capable of tracking eye movements to choose the right food that the user wants. However, according to New Scientist magazine, with the work of 'Virtual embodiment and mechanical reincarnation (VERE)' , for the first time, people can think of controlling robots at a distance to perform exercises. complex.

VERE consists of 3 steps. First, the thoughts of Mr. Tirosh Shapira, a volunteer student, will be scanned with the fMRI machine, which is used to monitor the patient's brain activity through alterations of blood flow. After that, a computer will translate these thoughts into orders. Finally, those orders will be transmitted over the internet to robots in France. To increase the immersive character, on top of the robot is equipped with a camera and the images are shown directly to Shapira.

The three challenges that Shapira made include freedom to move back and forth, follow behind another person and find a teapot placed in the room. The success of the experiment made Shapira feel like she was actually turning into a robot. He shared with New Scientist: 'Sometimes the line is broken, a scientist has picked up the robot to find out where the error lies and I have said: Hey, put me down'.

VERE still has 2 major limitations. Firstly, complex processing steps cause the robot to be delayed in executing commands, resulting in reduced user immersion. Second, because each person's brain activity is different, the operator needs to do preliminary exercises to help the machine determine which reaction is equivalent to what behavior.

In the next version, VERE scientists will replace today's small robots with HRP-4 made by Kawada Industries (Japan), with the same height as adults. They will also adjust decoding algorithms, not only capture brain activity from time to time, but also monitor changes throughout the process, to increase the accuracy and complexity of the transmitted movements. robot.

The movie Avatar has shown that reincarnated robots can be used for many different purposes. Dr. Grace uses avatars for scientific research and Colonel Quaritch uses avatars to exploit rare resources. Similarly, on the one hand, VERE works are being interested in by military organizations because of the ability to replace people to join the war. On the other hand, the invention will be an effective assistant for people with disabilities in their daily work.