This drone is being controlled by thought
This is basically telekinesis. Drone telekinesis. Teledronesis.
University of Minnesota
A month ago this was Iron Man 3 level science fiction. Now? Reality.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota today revealed a drone
that can be controlled merely by thought, and that's not even the
coolest thing about it. Published in the
Journal of Neuro Engineering, the project has implications in everything from unmanned vehicles to paraplegic mobility.
The setup here is pretty basic, futuristic though it seems. The drone is a commercially available four-blade helicopter--the
Parrot AR quadrotor--which
is basically a drone hobbyist's Model T. To control it, the "pilot"
wears a funny hat, the sensing end of an electroencephalogram (
EEG).
EEGs place an array of electrodes over a person's head, in a totally
non-invasive way, then pick up on electrical activity in the brain.
Clusters of activity, like thinking about making a fist with a right
hand, generates a spark in a specific area of the brain. That spark gets
translated through a computer into a quadrotor command ("turn right").
The command is then beamed to the quadrotor via WiFi.
Ideally, it works like in the image below:
Thought Drone Controls: Journal of Neural Engineering
Previously, researchers showed that subjects could control a virtual
helicopter with their thoughts. The latest demo--using a real, live
helicopter--is just another step toward more practical applications,
with the ultimate goal being to help people with disabilities and
neurdegenerative dieseases regain mobility, says researcher Bin He, a
professor of biomedicial engineering at the University of Michigan.
Why demonstrate the system with a drone? "It's more manageable to
test in protocol than it is to do on a patient with a prosthetic arm,"
he says. In the published paper, the pilot is illustrated as someone in a
wheelchair, sitting in front of a laptop that's streaming back
everything the drone sees. A thought-controlled wheelchair would
probably help that person out more, but ground-bounded wheelchairs
rarely encounter something both drones and arms deal with every day:
precisely navigating three dimensional space. Flying a drone through a
hoop turns out to be good practice for maneuvering a hand to a mouth,
say, or putting an arm through a sleeve.
The system is relatively easy to use. A series of exercises trained
the five students who piloted the drone. The first is a game that looks
like pong, where the subject used the EEG controls just to move a dot on
a screen right or left. The second controlled up/down motions, a third
combined them all in a similar, pong-like interface, and the fourth
exercise before actually piloting the drone involved a flight simulation
of the drone through hoops above an imaginary town.
There's a funny story about the sixth test pilot. The researchers
were asked to put together a video of how the drone worked, and on short
notice they couldn't find one of the original test pilots. Instead,
graduate student Brad Edelman had passed the first couple of tests, and
he happened to be in the lab at the time, so they sat him down to try
out the full thing. As you can see below, he flew it perfectly,
suggesting that the technology is intuitive enough for some people to
just pick up and use it.
