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Robotics Technology

Humans Can Now Correct Robots With Brainwaves (popularmechanics.com) 31

Researchers at MIT have built a system that allows robots to be corrected through thought and hand gestures. "The system monitors brain activity, determining if a person has noticed an error in the machine's work," reports Popular Mechanics. "If an error is detected, the system reverts over to human control. From that point, all it takes is a flick of the wrist to get the robot back on the right course." From the report: "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. By including muscle feedback, we can use gestures to command the robot spatially, with much more nuance and specificity," says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, who supervised the work, in a press statement. EEG refers to electroencephalography, a type of biofeedback which uses real-time displays of brain activity to each self-regulation to the brain. EMG feedback refers to electromyography, which is the recording of the electrical activity of muscle tissue.

Earlier brain recognition systems required people to think in highly specific ways to achieve EEG or EMG recognition. What Rus' team realized is that when the human brain recognizes an error, it automatically releases a very specific signal all on its own. These signals are called error-related potentials (ErrPs). When the robotic system notices an ErrP signal in the human brain, it turns the robot over to human control.

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Humans Can Now Correct Robots With Brainwaves

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  • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @09:03PM (#56819862) Homepage Journal
    ErrP signals have been known for decades. What did these people do? Hook up a muscle monitor to (badly) control a robot if a ErrP signal is detected? Is this what the top engineering universities are producing? I thought AI robots were right around the corner...
    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Its MindDrive for robots. Just like on your PC.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BoogieChile ( 517082 )

      Why don't you read the article and find out, instead of sitting in the corner being all Negative Nancy?

      Personally, I can imagine situations where a robot being able to stop itself doing whatever it is doing wrong a thousand times faster than the human operator could reach the kill switch might come in handy.

    • You're sucking my dick wrong. Change that.

      • You're sucking my dick wrong. Change that.

        Funny, I heard Trump starts every cabinet meeting, Hannity and Fox & Friends phone call like that.
        He once thought about opening a rally with that, but was advised against it.

    • ErrP signals have been known for decades. What did these people do? Hook up a muscle monitor to (badly) control a robot if a ErrP signal is detected? Is this what the top engineering universities are producing? I thought AI robots were right around the corner...

      It's just one possible input.

      I can see an application already, knowing someone with missing limbs.

      "AI-assisted Robot arm, do {some moderately complex task}".

      Robot arm starts to do it.

      Brain (non verbally) "hey, you're doing something wrong!"

  • Damn, I didn't know that robots HAD brainwaves. Maybe we could elect them to Congress to make things a little harder for lobbyists of EVERY flavor.
  • ... without brain waves?

  • Let me know when it achieves hands-free orgasms.
  • I'm eagerly awaiting the time when robots can correct human brainwaves. That's when things get interesting.

  • This could be useful for self-driving cars that aren't quite Level 5. If the human operator notices a problem (car doesn't seem to be stopping for that box of kittens in the road), dumping control to the human with a "take control now" alert might be better than hoping they decide to take the wheel. Being able to detect ErrP AND using eye-tracking to determine what concerning thing the human is looking at, could allow for human-moderated automated avoidance of that thing, even if the software itself doesn't

  • I prefer finger gestures.

  • http://gundam.wikia.com/wiki/MBF-M1_M1_Astray

    Good to see Kira working well at Morgenroete, Inc working on the Natural OS.  Eventually, we'll be able to take out that ZAFT scum and claim space for the Earth Alliance!
  • I have seen this movie.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

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