New Drone Technology Is a Real Mind Bender, Uses the Power of Your Thought as a Controller

And as it turns out, U.K.-based defense company Ultra Electronics has been working on this for quite a few years now, but it took until now to actually come up with a working prototype of the mind-controlled drone. Ultra Electronics offered a demonstration flight of its prototype at the Three Counties Defence and Security Expo, an annual event that takes place in England and hosts around 150 exhibitors.

In the attached demo footage, the pilot lifts the drone into the air into an indoor location and then lands it back on the table. She looks like she's simply staring at a laptop screen, focusing on some circles while wearing some sort of device on her head. It's hard to understand what's going on just by looking at the video. But, unfortunately, the explanation of Tony White, the company's CTO for land systems, doesn't make it all that much clearer.

But basically, the pilot sitting in front of the laptop has a sensor strapped to the head. The shapes on the screen are called tags, and according to White, they have a signal within them. So as the pilot stares at a particular shape, her eyes respond in a certain way. Then, depending on how that eye response reflects into a signal picked up on the brain's visual cortex.

The sensor strapped to the head looks for those signals coming from the eyeball, through the brain, and then on to the visual cortex. Once it is there, the sensor understands what that signal looks like and turns it into a command for the drone. The pilot can thus make the drone take off, rotate into the air, or land without moving as much as a finger.

So far, we have no idea what will happen next with Ultra Electronics' prototype. Still, the developer claims its technology can have a variety of applications, being suitable for use in unmanned vessels, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), in the military, and more.