Research in Brain Controlled Robots

Researchers from USA and Switzerland demonstrated state-of-the-art research in brain controlled robotics at the AAAS 2011 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Brain Controlled Telepresence Robot
José del R. Millan, Defitech professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, focused on how brain-machine interfaces can help patients limited in mobility to interact with their families. Not only can the patients keep mental control of the machine, but they can also perform daily tasks at the same time.
Out-of-body experience
Olaf Blanke, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, presented a virtual reality experiment that focused on self-consciousness in connection with body representation.
Brain Controlled Robot Arm Prothesis
Todd Kuiken, director at the Center for Bionic Medicine at Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, explained the neural interface technique “targeted reinnervation.” Glen Lehman, a retired U.S. Army sergeant who lost his arm while in combat in Iraq, accompanied Kuiken. When Lehman thinks about moving the arm, the arms moves.
Brain Controlled Robot Arm
Andrew Schwartz, professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh, also presented a way to control an artificial arm, but through the brain’s motor cortex. This would be beneficial for people with spinal cord injuries.

New Swiss Center of Robotics

A new National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics was opened December 1, 2010 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The new nation-wide centre is consisting of leading research groups across Switzerland with the common objective of developing new, human-oriented robotic technology.
NCCR Robotics gathers top ranked scientists in Switzerland from cutting-edge research institutions: EPFL as the leading house, ETH Zurich, University of Zurich and Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Center will run for up to twelve years, with a funding of about USD 5 million per year. The key research areas, around which the NCCR will be structured, are locomotion and mobility, interaction and manipulation, prosthetic robotics, distributed robotics, and robots for daily life.

A number of professor, PhD and postdoctoral positions are available.  More here

Robot Podcast from EPFL

A team of robot evangelists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland publish since May 2008 a podcast to provide free, high quality, educational information for the robotics community and the general public.

So far the team has talked about with experts about Robot Toys, Robot Musicians, Bio-inspired Locomotion, Androids, Human Presence and the Uncanny Valley Jumping and Crawling Millirobots, Warehouse Robots, Swarming Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, An Uncertain Revolution, Bacteria-Propelled Microrobots, DelFly and Europe's Micro Air Vehicle Competition, Robot Blogosphere, Modular and Reconfigurable Robots, Robot Soccer, A Robot Fly at Harvard and at the MoMA Cornell Racing Team and Velodyne's LIDAR Sensor

In their feb 2009 episod the team talks about ethical issues in robotics with two world-renowned experts in ethics. Noel Sharkey, professor of Public Engagement, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield in the UK and with Ronald Arkin, the director of the Mobile Robot Lab and Associate Dean of Research at Georgia Tech in the US.

Creative, inspiring, nice done! The Robots podcast is available via Apple iTunes and all other major podcast servers.