A research team gave the public a glimpse of the future Tuesday as it demonstrated technology allowing a person to move Honda's Asimo robot simply by thinking about it.
The technology, developed by the Honda Research Institute Japan (a subsidiary of Honda Motor Co.), the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) and Shimadzu Corp., allows a person to direct Asimo to raise its right and left arms, run, or "eat" by thinking of specific actions.
The system, a combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), does not use electrodes in direct contact with the brain, but rather a helmet that reads brain activity. Specifically, the helmet processes patterns in brain waves and blood flow in the brain associated with each action and then transmits the appropriate commands to Asimo.
For example, if a person thinks about moving his or her tongue, then Asimo will raise its hand to its face as though eating. Among the three human test subjects to participate in the research, the system was successful in interpreting their thoughts and sending them on to Asimo about 90 percent of the time.
However, there is currently a 7-9 second delay between the human controller's thoughts and Asimo's reaction, and due to the wide differences in brain activity patterns between individuals, the system must be specifically calibrated to each user.
In the future, the research team hopes to apply the technology to hands and feet-free driving and household robots.
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