SCIENTISTS AT THE Aeronautical Systems Centre (ASC) at the US Air Force's Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, are studying the use of brain-actuated control techniques as a means of controlling aircraft.
While project officials admit that a totally hands-off cockpit environment is still many years away, test pilots are beginning to make simple control inputs into a flight simulator using only the power of thought.
The study is exploring the concept, somewhat backwards, by giving test subjects a basic ability to use their minds for control, and then trying to find out how they acquire that ability in the first place.
In the past, the problem with thought-control techniques has been discerning the faint electromagnetic brain signals, which accompany voluntary thought from the flurry of "background noise" in the brain caused by everyday activity.
In the ASC experiments, pilots in a simulator face two fluorescent lights, which pulse at 13.25Hz.
This causes nerve cells in the subject's visual cortex to fire at the same frequency. Electrodes on their heads detect the resulting brain-wave patterns, feeding them to an amplifier and a filter. The filter picks out the 13.25Hz waves and measures their power.
A bar scale displays a measurement of these waves, which allows the subjects to learn how to vary the intensity of their brain responses. On the simulator, heightened intensities cause the simulated aircraft to bank to the right; depressed intensities cause it to bank to the left.
"Our subjects can't say exactly what it is they learn to do," says Grant McMillan, director of bio-cybernetics at the ASC. "They say it's like learning to walk. After a while, they no longer have to think about what they're doing." Project physicist John Schnurer adds that the more successfully pilots control the simulator, the less able they are to explain how they do it.
Although the study uses major aircraft-manoeuvres to demonstrate the viability of the concept, it is unlikely that the first brain-actuated controls will involve flying an aircraft.
"We will start slowly," says McMillan, "with easy tasks and optional controls, things a pilot can do if he wants, but not crash and burn if he fails."
One of the main advantages of the techniques is to give pilots a better chance of managing the increasing amount of data that is imported into the combat-aircraft cockpit.
"If your hands are busy with other tasks, it would be nice to be able to think, 'I'd like to see that other screen now,' or to choose items from an on-screen menu," says Victoria Nasman, a neuro-physiologist attached to the study.
While the USAF is pursuing its study with military applications primarily in mind, it says that the technique could assist other, more general, computer-related tasks.
Source: Flight International