My friend is working on a robot that can be mind controlled.
He basically wears a headset, and that headset translate brain signal into control signal to move a robot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XewJh_0nLvM
What could be the potential advantage of these kind of robots versus robots controlled by remotes (99.99% of all robots nowadays)?
The advantage (at the current state of the technology) is that you don't need to use a remote with your hands, so the paralyzed could move their exoskeletons, for instance. For now, there is still the downside that the the device needs to be trained and the commands that can be read are rather simplistic. However, in the future these types of devices will greatly enhance human-computer interaction by allowing the brain the communicate in the same way as it communciates naturally with the environment. So, imagining yourself as the robot moving around (and the robot following your imagined moves) is a lot more fluent, intuitive, and precise than pressing a bunch of buttons! The technology still needs to get to this stage, however.
