#ssvep

[iscab]

TODO-Y03-M07-D01

Ph.D. Note  Di, 01.03.2016

“May every young scientist remember and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery.” – Patrick Blackett (British physicist, 1897-1974)

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http://drhdrdro.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/todo-y03-m06-d26/ http://drhdrdro…

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[feedbackloopnews-blog]

Mind Controlled Robots

Everyone, at some point, wishes at some point that they could control things with their mind. Who wouldn’t want that kind of power? Luckily, this is not complete science fiction: Researchers in a cross-collaboration between France and Japan (the CRNS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory) are working on a robot that acts according to your thoughts.

Well, sort of. The researchers use a little trick with flickering lights to know what your thinking. When you look at a light that flashes at a speed of more than 3.5 times a second, your brain neurons create a signal that matches the light’s frequency. These signals are easily measured by electrodes placed on your scalp. In the video below, the four arrows on the computer screen are flashing at different frequencies and many of these frequencies are picked up at the same time by the cyborg-like helmet the subject wears. The machine then weighs the strength of each frequency signal and figures out the location of your gaze. It tries to infer what object you are looking at and what you might be interested in. Objects that the subject sees on the screen can have their own frequency as well, to choose more accurately.

The next trick they use is an AI concept called affordance. This basically means that an object’s properties (size, shape, compactness, etc.) suggest what you can, and probably should, do with it. For example, a baseball fits into the palm of your hand. It would be much easier to throw it than to try to sit on it or wear it as a hat. Measuring how suited an object is for a certain task helps the robot respond accordingly when the system picks up that you are interested in it. In a few cases, the robot already has the instructions of how to deal with a certain object.

This advancement in robotics can help people who are bedridden or cannot fully move about interact with the world in ways that they may have never imagined.

Note: The man standing behind the robot is not influencing its actions. He's protecting the power button and the robot's balance.

[beyondsingularity]

Brain Computer Interface used to control the movement and actions of an android robot.

"Basically we would like to create devices which would allow people to feel embodied, in the body of a humanoid robot. To do so we are trying to develop techniques from Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) so that we can read the peoples thoughts and then try to see how far we can go from interpreting brain waves signals, to transform them into actions to be done by the robot."

[theluciusfox-blog]

Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) has become one of the most promising modalities for a practical noninvasive BCI system. Owing to both the limitation of refresh rate of liquid crystal display (LCD) or cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor, and the specific physiological response property that only a very small number of stimuli at certain frequencies could evoke strong SSVEPs, the available frequencies for SSVEP stimuli are limited. Therefore, it may not be enough to code multiple targets with the traditional frequencies coding protocols, which poses a big challenge for the design of a practical SSVEP-based BCI. This study aimed to provide an innovative coding method to tackle this problem.