Brain-Machine Interface
Assembly Line
🧠 Sci-Fi on the Factory Floor: Brain-machine Interfaces
With the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), there has also been a rise in brain-machine interface (BMI) research. Just recently, researchers at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) designed a non-invasive brain-machine interface (BMI) technology. The technology allowed users to operate a quadruped robot with their minds, showing 94% accuracy.
While robotic mind control is still a technology in research and development, a fully-integrated BMI would result in having a thought acted out in real life just by merely thinking of it. BMIs have the potential to improve reaction times and perform appropriate actions, perhaps without requiring as much job-specific training.
BMIs have the potential to reduce the response time for certain actions. Currently, a human’s response time consists of seeing an event, mentally processing it, and sending commands to the fingers and hands to interact with a human-machine interface, all while walking through a Standard Operating Procedure, which can change with time and differ from the initial training procedure. With a BMI, a plant operator can see an event, process it, and then allow the external processor to decide which actions need to be performed and in what order based on the newest code version.