title: A brain-machine interface to navigate a mobile robot in a planar workspace: enabling humans to fly simulated aircraft with EEG.
abstract: This paper presents an interface for navigating a mobile robot that moves at a fixed speed in a planar workspace, with noisy binary inputs that are obtained asynchronously at low bit-rates from a human user through an electroencephalograph (EEG). The approach is to construct an ordered symbolic language for smooth planar curves and to use these curves as desired paths for a mobile robot. The underlying problem is then to design a communication protocol by which the user can, with vanishing error probability, specify a string in this language using a sequence of inputs. Such a protocol, provided by tools from information theory, relies on a human user's ability to compare smooth curves, just like they can compare strings of text. We demonstrate our interface by performing experiments in which twenty subjects fly a simulated aircraft at a fixed speed and altitude with input only from EEG. Experimental results show that the majority of subjects are able to specify desired paths despite a wide range of errors made in decoding EEG signals.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. aakce2@illinois.edu
authors.forename: Abdullah
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Akce
authors.forename: Miles
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.forename: Or
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Dantsker
authors.forename: Timothy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bretl
mesh_terms: D000401:Aircraft; D000465:Algorithms; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008328:Man-Machine Systems; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D014584:User-Computer Interface