Brain-actuated Control of Robot Navigation

Brain-driven robot navigation control is a new field stemming from recent successes in brain interfaces. Broadly speaking, brain interfaces comprise any system that aims to enable user control of a device based on brain activity-related signals, be them conscious or unconscious, voluntary or evoked, invasive or non-invasive. Strictly speaking, the term should also include technology that directly affects brains states (e.g., transcranial magnetic stimulation), but these are not usually included in the terminology. Two main families of brain interfaces exist according to the usual terminology, although the terms are often used interchangeably as well: i) Brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) usually refers to brain-tocomputer interfaces that use non-invasive technology; ii) Brain-machine interfaces (or BMIs) often refers to implanted brain-interfaces. This chapter shall use these terms (BCI and BMI) as defined in this paragraph. Other sub-categories of BCIs are discussed below. The idea of BCIs is credited to Jaques Vidal (1973) who first proposed the idea in concrete scientific and technological terms. Until the late 1990’s the area progressed slowly as a result of work in but a handful of laboratories in Europe and North America, most notably the groups at the Wadsworth Centre (Albany, NY) and the Graz (Austria) group led by G. Pfurtscheller. Aside from the few researchers working on BCIs in the ‘70s and ’80s, slow progress then was largely due to limitations in: i) our understanding of brain electrophysiology, ii) quality and cost of recording equipment, iii) computer memory and processing speed, and iv) the performance of pattern recognition algorithms. The state-ofthe-art in these areas and the number of BCI researchers have dramatically increased in the last ten years or so. Yet, there is still an enormous amount of work do be done before BCIs can be used reliably outside controlled laboratory conditions. In this chapter, an overview of BCIs will be given, followed by a discussion of specific approaches for BCI-based robot navigation control. The chapter then concludes with a summary of challenges for the future of this new and exciting technology.

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