Chip Audette. OpenBCI
Attention evil geniuses! Mind-controlled robots aren’t that expensive. Chip Audette just built one by attaching his laptop to less than $500 in specialized equipment and writing a little custom software code.
The robot—really a Hexbug Spider—is connected to some nifty brain-wave-reading hardware called OpenBCI. WIRED wrote about this open source project back in January as they were getting their Kickstarter project off the ground. That campaign is now complete, and the OpenBCI team will ship out its first brain-reading kits next month. But a few lucky hackers like Audette have been able to get their hands on early prototypes of the hardware. And they’ve been putting it to good use, giving us an early taste of what can be done with this type of gear.
There’s the Brainwriter—an OpenBCI hack designed to help patients with ALS create art with using their brain waves. And in the Bay Area, a self-described group of cognitive technologists are fusing the toolkit with code that uploads brain signals to the internet. The idea is to use cloud computing to spin up the kind of computing power you’d need to do real-time analysis of brain waves. “If, for instance, we get a group of people into a room and have them all send their EEG data to the cloudbrain, what patterns would emerge?” says Pierre Karashchuk, one of the project’s developers. And then there’s the contraption from Chip Audette.
As you can see from the video below, Audette’s brain-powered robot makes for a pretty fun demo. There are glitches, but generally, it works. When Audette closes his eyes, the robot marches forward. If he focuses on a flashing image, it turns right. And if he eyes another flashing image, it turns left.
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