Soon, you may get to control robots with brain waves, hand gestures

Boston: MIT scientists have developed a system that allows humans to control robots using brainwaves and simple hand gestures, preventing machines from committing errors in real time.

By monitoring brain activity, the system can detect in real time if a person notices an error as a robot does a task. Using an interface that measures muscle activity, the person can then make hand gestures to scroll through and select the correct option for the robot to

execute.

The team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the US demonstrated the system on a task in which a robot moves a power drill to one of three possible targets on the body of a mock plane. They showed that the system works on users it has never interacted with before, meaning that organisations could deploy it in real-world settings without needing to train it on users.

"This work combining EEG and EMG feedback enables natural human-robot interactions for a broader set of applications than we've been able to do before using only EEG feedback," said CSAIL director Daniela Rus, who supervised the work.

"By including muscle feedback, we can use gestures to command the robot spatially, with much more nuance and specificity," said Rus.