Mind. Blown. Brain-controlled drone race pushes future tech

(AP) — Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff.

The competition — billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface — involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend.

Each EEG headset is calibrated to identify the electrical activity associated with particular thoughts in each wearer's brain — recording, for example, where neurons fire when the wearer imagines pushing a chair across the floor.

Professor Juan Gilbert, whose computer science students organized the race, is inviting other universities to assemble brain-drone racing teams for 2017, pushing interest in a technology with a potential that seems limited only by the human imagination.

The U.S. Defense Department — which uses drones to kill suspected terrorists in the Middle East from vast distances — is looking for military brain-control applications.

A 2014 Defense grant supports the Unmanned Systems Laboratory at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where researchers have developed a system enabling a single person with no prior training to fly multiple drones simultaneously through mind control.

[...] enthusiasts should think carefully before handing over their brainwaves for purposes that have yet to be conceived or contained, said Kit Walsh, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation with a degree in neuroscience from MIT.