Fly a drone with your brain and eyes!

This University of Michigan student team developed a way to control a drone with a new kind of controller…

We work with students of all ages — from outreach to early elementary, to hands-on demonstrations, labs, and even research with students from fifth grade to… well, grad school and beyond!

We wanted to share this novel and exciting project which is the result of a group of Aerospace Engineering students who had an exciting question: Can we fly a plane, or at least a drone, with our thoughts?

It wasn’t an easy project, but with very minimal support on our end, they were able to get a prototype up and running within just the few weeks allotted to the project!

But how does it work?

The students took advantage of two signals that you can record using the Heart and Brain SpikerBox – First, EEG (Electroencephalograms, or brain waves) could be used to “wake up” the drone (take off / ready) by opening your eyes, or “put it to sleep” (land / standby) by closing your eyes. This works because, when you record from your occipital lobe, alpha waves are present when your eyes are closed, and “disappear” when they are open – a phenomenon which the students leveraged for their “On/Off” switch.

Then they used EOG signals (Electrooculograms, from your eyes!) to tell the drone to move in different directions depending on if you are looking up, down, left, or right. This is possible thanks to the different electrical signals recorded when you look in different directions.

They were able to do this in real time, creating a very creative control scheme that could be applied to other devices as well. The sky is the limit for the future of this project! Or maybe not just the sky… maybe space isn’t even a limit anymore for students these days!

If you have a story to share, email us at hello@backyardbrains.com !

Do you see what I see? Record the electrooculogram(EOG) of your eyes with a SpikerShield!

**Edit: The Heart & Brain SpikerShield has been replaced by the Heart & Brain SpikerBox!**

The Backyard Brains Heart and Brain SpikerShield is pretty amazing-you can use it to look at both the electrical activity of your heart (across your wrists even!) and the rhythmic electrical activity of your brain. As with all our products however, this wasn’t good enough for us, so we’ve been developing even more experiments for it!

You may have seen our recent experiment looking at the human EOG (ElectroOculoGram). It turns out that the eye forms an electric dipole, where the front is more positively charged and the back more negative. When you move a dipole, such as the eye, it creates an easily observable (at least, with our H&B SpikerShield) electric potential deflection.  Based on the direction of deflection (positive or negative) it’s even possible to tell which direction the eye is moving in!  It’s easy to set up and requires no additional equipment beyond the H&B Bundle.

How strong of a deflection can you or your students create?  Can you tell where someone’s looking just from the potential their eye generates? Grab one today to explore this fascinating intersection of neuroscience and physics.