The Robot That Reads Your Mind to Train Itself
From: BBC News - 10/24/2010
By: Lakshmi Sandhana 

University of Washington researchers are developing brain-computer interface
(BCI) technology by teaching robots new skills using only brain signals. The
researchers, led by Washington professor Rajesh Rao, began by programming a
humanoid robot with simple behaviors that users could select with a wearable
electroencephalogram (EEG) cap, which detects brain activity. The researchers
are developing a hierarchical BCI for controlling the robot to emulate human
thought and decision making. "The resulting system is both adaptive and
hierarchical - adaptive because it learns from the user and hierarchical
because new commands can be composed as sequences of previously learned
commands," Rao says. Other research groups also are developing
thought-controlled robots. Honda researchers recently demonstrated a robot
that can lift an arm or a leg through signals sent wirelessly from a system
operated by a user wearing an EEG cap. University of Zaragoza scientists are
working on creating robotic wheelchairs that can be manipulated by thought.
"It does make good sense to teach the robot a growing set of higher-level
tasks and then be able to call upon them without having to describe them in
detail every time," says Tufts University professor Robert Jacob. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11457127

Links:
Rajesh Rao
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/

Mind Reader
http://inmytrends.com/mind-reader.html

Brain Control
http://singularityhub.com/tag/brain-control/