Robotic Control Using Physiological EMG and EEG Signals

Abstract

In situations where there are multiple elements to be controlled and monitored it takes the user a considerable amount of time to become familiar with the environment, whether it’s the cockpit of an aircraft or the control station in a nuclear power plant. There are factors that could also lead to change in the environment such as hardware improvements, variations in model or even space limitations, which would force the user to relearn the environment. However if the user could maintain control using only their body and brain they would become independent of the environment insuring users would not need to retrain once this system was learned. For example: if the user raised their arm to activate “module A” in a control setup in Tokyo then used a control system in Texas, “module A” would be activated in the same manner, irrelevant of hardware variation or the amount of space available in the control room. Though this is the overall goal a simplified proof of concept project had to be carried out first to understand the feasibility and potential problems that could be faced.

This project is supported in part by the Marie Curie international incoming fellowship H2R project (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-IIF-275078).