Towards a Brain-Robot Interface for children

Brain-Computer Interface systems have been widely studied and explored with adults demonstrating the possibility to achieve augmentative communication and control directly from the users' brain. Nevertheless, the study and the exploitation of the BCI in children seems to be limited. In this pap...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inConference proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics pp. 2799 - 2805
Main Authors Beraldo, Gloria, Tortora, Stefano, Menegatti, Emanuele
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2019
Subjects
Brain-computer interfaces
Navigation
Pediatrics
Protocols
Robots
Training
Visualization
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN2577-1655
DOI10.1109/SMC.2019.8914612

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Summary:Brain-Computer Interface systems have been widely studied and explored with adults demonstrating the possibility to achieve augmentative communication and control directly from the users' brain. Nevertheless, the study and the exploitation of the BCI in children seems to be limited. In this paper we propose and present for the first time a Brain-Robot Interface enabling children to mentally drive a robot. With this regards, we exploit the combination of a P300-based Brain-Computer Interface and a shared-autonomy approach to achieve a reliable and safe robot navigation. We tested our system in a pilot study involving five children. Our preliminary results highlight the advantages of using an accumulation framework, thanks to which the performance of the children reached the 81.67 % ± 12.7 on average in terms of accuracy. During the experiments, the shared-autonomy approach involved a low-level intelligent control on board of the robot to avoid obstacles, enabling an effective navigation also with a small number of commands.
ISSN:2577-1655
DOI:10.1109/SMC.2019.8914612