Scientists from the University of Washington are experimenting with a robot that is controlled through brain signals. The signals are captured using electrodes on the head of the user, and despite the fact that such technique is very complex they reported to have achieved 94% of accuracy when giving simple commands to the robot.

The coordinator of the project, Rajesh Rao, said that the commands being used are still as simple as moving forward or backward or picking up objects, but in the near future the technology should mature and allow the researchers to execute more complex routines.

According to Rajesh Rao “one of the important things about this demonstration is that we’re using a ‘noisy’ brain signal to control the robot, (…) the technique for picking up brain signals is non-invasive, but that means we can only obtain brain signals indirectly from sensors on the surface of the head, and not where they are generated deep in the brain. As a result, the user can only generate high-level commands such as indicating which object to pick up or which location to go to, and the robot needs to be autonomous enough to be able to execute such commands.”

It is interesting the see how human beings are starting to get more and more integrated with machines and electronic devices. Do you think in the future a man will be able to plug his brain directly to a personal computer and do things such as “download” the lyric of a song or get the vocabulary for the French language in a matter of seconds?

Via: LiveScience