NeuroDoctrine flies three drones with a brain-signal headband in Manchester

By Inside BCI · Edited by Velco Dar · October 28, 2026

The operator kept his hands in his pockets while three drones took off and circled a courtyard in Manchester in late September. His only controller was a headband reading his brain signals. The demonstration, at the company’s own two-day launch event, the inaugural NeuroDoctrine Manchester Defence and Space Summit, was the public debut of NeuroDoctrine, a start-up that wants defence contractors to build its brain-signal control into their drones and munitions.

What was shown

The headband carries small pins that pick up electrical activity over the visual cortex, at the back of the head. Processors on the device turn the signals into commands and send them to the drones over Bluetooth. Founder and chief executive Zied Tayeb says calibrating the system to a new user takes about six hours, because each person’s brain patterns differ.

Tayeb says the company has flown up to 10 drones at once, so far all flying together as one group. A command from the operator sets off a pre-programmed task, so the system works alongside the drones’ own autonomy. He argues a person must stay in the loop because fully autonomous systems cannot be trusted with weapons. For flights beyond the operator’s line of sight, the user watches a screen, and the company is developing goggles that show where the drone is flying. NeuroDoctrine’s website claims 98 per cent accuracy, latency under 300 milliseconds and a ratio of more than 500 systems per operator, far above the 10 drones it says it has flown. It has published no test data behind those figures.

Who is behind it

Tayeb did his doctoral research at the Technical University of Munich’s Institute for Cognitive Systems from 2017, working on brain-computer interfaces and neuroprosthetics, and has co-authored prosthetics research with Johns Hopkins researchers. He has said his mother’s multiple sclerosis drew him to neuroscience. In 2021 he and Samaher Garbaya, now NeuroDoctrine’s co-founder and chief operating officer, launched Myelin-H, a multiple sclerosis monitoring start-up, in Luxembourg. He now also runs MyelinZ, which builds brain and body monitoring tools and whose UK company, MyelinZ Ltd, was incorporated in December 2024 and is registered in Manchester, with Garbaya as company secretary.

NeuroDoctrine’s website lists offices in Los Angeles and Manchester, and its leadership page adds Leuven in Belgium and Luxembourg. It names Lisa Sanders, a former director of science and technology for US Special Operations Command, and retired Lieutenant General Roger Cloutier Jr, who commanded NATO Allied Land Command until 2022, among its advisers and investors. The company is raising money and wants larger defence contractors to adopt its system. Tayeb’s stated aim is a “neural operating system that would sit on top of the autonomous capabilities of munitions”.

Why it matters

Brain-signal control of robots has been demonstrated in research for at least a decade. In 2016 an Arizona State University team funded by DARPA and the US Air Force used a 128-electrode cap to control up to four small robots, some of which flew, with calibration needed every day. In a demonstration the University of Technology Sydney publicised in March 2023, Australian Army soldiers steered a robot dog with a UTS headset that read the visual cortex through dry graphene sensors while they looked at flickering squares, with up to 94 per cent accuracy. In December 2025 Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an showed an operator in an EEG cap changing a drone swarm’s formation by focusing on a flickering screen block.

NeuroDoctrine is pitching the same kind of non-invasive control as a product for defence buyers, backed by a former senior US special operations official and a retired US general who led a NATO command. Its argument for keeping a person in control of armed systems is in line with the UK Ministry of Defence’s 2022 policy, which requires context-appropriate human involvement in weapons that identify, select and attack targets.

Field use is the hard part. Recent reviews find that dry electrodes give a noisier signal than gel-based ones and pick up more interference from movement. Some decoding methods used with flickering targets need time-consuming calibration, and visual fatigue can degrade the signal. NeuroDoctrine has not said whether its system uses flickering targets.

Not disclosed

NeuroDoctrine has not published test data supporting its accuracy and latency claims, said how many people have used the system, or disclosed how much it has raised, from whom beyond its two named backers, or at what valuation. It has not named any customer, trial partner or government programme, or said which legal entity owns the business. No UK company of that name appears on the Companies House register; NeuroDoctrine also lists offices outside the UK.

What to watch

Whether NeuroDoctrine publishes performance data from tests run outside its own events.

Whether a defence ministry or a large defence contractor signs a trial or contract with the company.

Whether the company announces a funding round and its investors.

Whether the six-hour calibration comes down to something a soldier could complete in the field.

Sources

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Coverage:

news UK defence drones NeuroDoctrine Zied-Tayeb EEG non-invasive-BCI human-machine-teaming autonomy MyelinZ