With drones starting to become more commonplace, it seems that there are some who are starting to treat drone racing like an actual sport. So much so that even ESPN will be covering the 2016 National Drone Racing Championships in which pilots will put their flight skills to the test through a series of obstacles that they have to fly their drones through.
While that in itself looks pretty exciting, it seems that over at the University of Florida, they have come up with their own form of drone racing but instead of relying on a regular set of controls, students will be racing drones using their brain power, or to be more specific their brain activity. Students will wear Emotiv Insight’s EEG headsets that will read their brain activity which in turn will be used as a control mechanism for the drones.
As you can see in the video above, it looks like students will have to concentrate really hard in order to control their drones, but then again in most sports, concentration and getting into that “zone” is the key. While we did not actually see any racing, we guess “winners” can be determined by how fast they can think and control their drones.
Obviously there are long-term goals for such technology as it could also be applied to other fields. For example we’ve already seen how brain activity can be used to control wheelchairs, or how you can use your brain activity to type on a laptop, and so on, so using brains to control and race drones isn’t that far-fetched.
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