Back
Zürich. On October 8, 2016, a collaboration of the research group "Brain-Computer-Interfaces" at the MPI-IS and the "Autonomous Systems Lab" at the TU Darmstadt will send a joint team into the Brain-computer-Interface Race at the Cybathlon 2016 in Zurich. The so called Athena-Minerva team consists mainly of computer science students of bachelor and master-level at the Technical University Darmstadt. They are interested in "Machine Learning", signal processing and especially for Brain-Computer-Interfaces (BCI). The team is headed by Moritz Grosse-Wentrup from MPI-IS and by Jan Peters, TU Darmstadt. The pilot is Sebastian Reul.
In contrast to other parathletic competitions where assistive technologies are required to not provide an unfair advantage for the parathletes, the Cybathlon encourages such enhanced technologies to present advances and push research in bionic systems even further. The so-called Athena-Minerva-Team develops a noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface system that is able to interpret neuronal activity in the brain measured by Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from the scalp. This will enable our pilots to play the game by only thinking at a desired command that is recognized by our BCI system and sent to the game. As brain activity differs between subjects, our pilots and their BCI systems will usually have to adapt to each other in individual training sessions in order to play and finally win the Cybathlon race.