Want... The technology by which people control other beings through a brain link featured in the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar may be closer to realization than you might think, according to a report in the Shanghai Morning Post cited by Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po. Li Guanghua, a graduate student at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University has successfully managed to control the movements of a live cockroach using a human brain, under the direction of his advisor Zhang Dingguo. The cockroach was directed by the person controlling it to walk in an S and a Z pattern.
Signals from the human brain are transmitted to the brain of cockroach, allowing the human to control the cockroach's movements remotely, according to the report.
The controller wears portable wireless EEG equipment. They then respond to visual stimuli which creates an image prompting them to control directions; the computer program deciphers the electrical signals from the brain, and identifies the intentions of the controller, turning this into a command and sending it wirelessly to a receiver mounted on the cockroach's back; the antenna nerves in the cockroach's brain are implanted with tiny electrodes, which allow the controller to control it.
The project won second place in the 2015 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Student Activities Committee's Video Contest. The researcher plans to launch a larger scale project in the future, in which various controllers will race their cockroaches against one another.
This is not the first time that students in China have used this kind of technology. In 2012 at Zhejiang University microchips allowed monkeys to control mechanical arms.
You can view the video of the cockroach experiment here: https://youtu.be/k5t6WkTkJkA
Poster Comment:
Potential for handling pet behavior?