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

IKEA´s nightmare Swiss Roombots

Forget IKEA flat-pack furniture think Roombots, modular robots to be used as building blocks for furniture that assembles itself,  that can change shape over time - a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a sofa. Furniture that moves using actuated joints to different locations depending on the users needs. When not needed, the group of modules create a static structure such as a wall or a box.

Roombots are the robotics vision of researchers at the Biorobotics Lab, EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The  project is funded by the Locomorph project and the Swiss National Center of Competence of Research in Robotics (NCCR). Preliminary studied were also funded by Microsoft Research Cambridge and EPFL.