The robot that reads your mind to train itself

Lakshmi Sandhana -

Rajesh Rao is a man who believes that the best type of robotic helper is one who can read your mind.

... the Neural Systems Laboratory, University of Washington, hopes to take brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to the next level by attempting to teach robots new skills directly via brain signals. ...

Dr Rao's team began by programming a humanoid robot with simple behaviours which users could then select with a wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that picked up their brain activity.

The brain generates what is known as a P300, or P3, signal involuntarily, each time it recognizes an object. This signal is caused by millions of neurons firing together in a synchronised fashion.

This has been used by many researchers worldwide to create BCI-based applications that allow users to spell a word, identify images, select buttons in a virtual environment and more recently, even play in an orchestra or send a Twitter message ...

"What if the user wants the robot to do something new?" Dr Rao asked.

The answer, he said, was to tap into the brain's "hierarchical" system used to control the body.

"The brain is organised into multiple levels of control including the spinal cord at the low level to the neocortex at the high level," he said.

"The low level circuits take care of behaviours such as walking while the higher level allows you to perform other behaviours. ...

To emulate this kind of behaviour - albeit in a more simplistic fashion - Dr Rao and his team are developing a hierarchical brain-computer interface for controlling the robot.

"A behaviour initially taught by the user is translated into a higher-level command. When invoked later, the details of the behaviour are handled by the robot," he said....

via BBC News - The robot that reads your mind to train itself.