Abstracto

A Telepresence Mobile Robot Controlled With a Non-Invasive Brain-Computer Interface

T.Shanmugapriya, S.Senthilkumar

This paper reports an EEG-based brain-actuated telepresence system to provide a user with presence in remote environments through a mobile robot, with access to the Internet. This system relies on a P300-based BCI and a mobile robot with autonomous navigation and camera orientation capabilities. The shared-control strategy is built by the BCI decoding of task-related orders (selection of visible target destinations or exploration areas), which can be autonomously executed by the robot. The system was evaluated using five healthy participants in two consecutive steps: (i) screening and training of participants, and (ii) preestablished navigation and visual exploration telep- resence tasks. On the basis of the results, the following evaluation studies are reported: (i) technical evaluation of the device and its main functionalities, and (ii) users’ behavior study. The overall result was that all participants were able to complete the designed tasks reporting no failures, which shows the robustness of the system and its feasibility to solve tasks in real settings where joint navigation and visual exploration were needed. Furthermore, the participants showed great adaptation to the telepresence system.