Using Collaborative Brain Activity to Navigate Space
In the first paper ever to explore the possibility of controlling a spacecraft using a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), the authors found a promising finding that 67.5% of the simulated runs satisfied the success criterion — meaning that the spacecraft was steered safely on a given route. Along with this, they found that controlling the spacecraft via two collaborative BCI’s is even better than controlling the spacecraft using one person’s BCI.
Brain-Computer Interactions (BCI) help to convert signals from the brain into a sort of remote control for many applications, in this case controlling a spacecraft. So far, there has never been an attempt in a study to control anything to do with space and space travel via brain activity, mostly because the study lies in the subsection of BCI called Brain-Machine Interaction (BMI). In BMI studies, it is notoriously difficult to pinpoint what brain activity will lead to what sort of physical movement of a machine, which means it’s difficult to control and hypothesize controlling movement via brain signals. But why could moving a spacecraft via brain activity, or even just incorporating brain activity with any tasks done in space, be important?
By moving physical objects with just our brain activity, we could not only speed up tasks for those in space, but we could also improve the safety of our astronauts by ensuring that they could control machines from a safer area, completely hands-free. For example, if exploring space or planets with dangerous atmospheres, it would be safer for the astronauts to not interact in the environments themselves, but rather to maybe control machines from the safety of their spacecraft.
In this study specifically, they combined two different BCIs: one that simulated a spacecraft control task shown on a screen as eight circles that participants used to control direction (a modified version of the Space Commander spacecraft simulator) and a BCI that converts brain activity into 2-D mouse pointer movements used to navigate control, shown in figure 1.
Figure 1. How the 2-D mouse pointer looked in the modified Space Commander simulator.
But they didn’t stop at having only one person try to control the spacecraft via the simulator, they also tried collaborative control through the BCI. Much like how on an airplane you have a pilot and a co-pilot, they tested out how effective having not just a pilot but also a copilot would be on the accuracy of navigating the spacecraft. In figures 2.1 through 2.3 below you’ll see three different charts, one labelled “single users”, the next labelled “Joint (Separate SVMs)” and the last labelled “Joint (Averaged ERPs, same SVM)”. Ideally, we want the three colored lines to be as close to the horizontal line at zero as possible, meaning that is the most accurate navigation of the spacecraft that they can do. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the graph labelled “Joint (Averaged ERPs, same SVM) has the lines that are closest to that horizontal line at zero. This means that having the pilot and copilot, two people controlling the navigation of the spacecraft, resulted in the most accurate navigation when compared to a single pilot and compared to two pilots that had their activity averaged together.
But what could this mean for the future? It means that we could use collaborative brain activity to eventually navigate space and maybe implement this with more things earthbound, such as airplanes or cars. However, there are other complications of actually implementing this in space, including microgravity, increased stress, and lack of sleep; meaning actually having astronauts pilot their rockets with their brains is pretty far away.
Poli, R., Cinel, C., Matran-Fernandez, A., Sepulveda, F., & Stoica, A. (2013, March). Towards cooperative brain-computer interfaces for space navigation. In Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (pp. 149–160).
