University of Washington Associate Professor Rajesh Rao and students demonstrated an individual can "order" a robot to move to specific locations and pick up specific objects by generating brain waves that reflect the individual's instructions.

"This is really a proof-of-concept demonstration," Rao said. "It suggests that one day we might be able to use semi-autonomous robots for such jobs as helping disabled people or performing routine tasks in a person's home."

The controlling individual wears a cap containing 32 electrodes that detect brain signals from the scalp. Although the "thought commands" are currently limited to a few basic instructions, the controller is able to instruct the robot to move forward, choose one of two available objects, pick it up and take it to one of two locations.

Preliminary results show 94 percent accuracy in choosing the correct object.

The results were presented this month during a meeting of the Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing, part of the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.