The first of those took place last July, when Abderrahmane Kheddar, director of the CNRS-AIST joint robotics laboratory at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his team used FMRI to allow someone to control a robot located thousands of miles away using only their thoughts.
"Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals, " said Zhong Lin Wang, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.