This is not a Jedi mind trick! A team of scientists at MIT has created a robot that can be controlled by a human brain.
The scientists, working from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University, created a feedback system that lets people correct robot mistakes with nothing more than their brains.
Using data from an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor that records brain activity, the system can detect if a person notices an error if a robot performs an object-sorting task.
When a person's brain notices that a mistake has been made or is about to be made, it creates brain signals called "error-related potentials" (ErrPs). As the robot indicates which choice it wants to make, it looks for ErrPs to determine if the human agrees with the decision.
While the system currently handles relatively simple binary-choice activities, MIT's CSAIL believes the work suggests that we could one day control robots in much more intuitive ways.
