A Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface for Closed-Loop Position Control of a Robot Arm

Brain-Computer interfacing(BCI)has currently added a new dimension in assistive robotics.Existing braincomputer interfaces designed for position control applications suffer from two fundamental limitations.First,most of the existing schemes employ open-loop control,and thus are unable to track positional errors,resulting in failures in taking necessary online corrective actions.There are examples of a few works dealing with closed-loop electroencephalography(EEG)-based position control.These existing closed-loop brain-induced position control schemes employ a fixed order link selection rule,which often creates a bottleneck preventing time-efficient control.Second,the existing brain-induced position controllers are designed to generate a position response like a traditional firstorder system,resulting in a large steady-state error.This paper overcomes the above two limitations by keeping provisions for steady-state visual evoked potential(SSVEP)induced linkselection in an arbitrary order as required for efficient control and generating a second-order response of the position-control system with gradually diminishing overshoots/undershoots to reduce steady-state errors.Other than the above,the third innovation is to utilize motor imagery and P300 signals to design the hybrid brain-computer interfacing system for the said application with gradually diminishing error-margin using speed reversal at the zero-crossings of positional errors.Experiments undertaken reveal that the steady-state error is reduced to 0.2%.The paper also provides a thorough analysis of the stability of the closed-loop system performance using the Root Locus technique.

Asynchronous Brain-Computer Interface Shared Control of Robotic Grasping

The control of a high Degree of Freedom(DoF) robot to grasp a target in three-dimensional space using Brain-Computer Interface(BCI) remains a very difficult problem to solve. Design of synchronous BCI requires the user perform the brain activity task all the time according to the predefined paradigm; such a process is boring and fatiguing. Furthermore, the strategy of switching between robotic auto-control and BCI control is not very reliable because the accuracy of Motor Imagery(MI) pattern recognition rarely reaches 100%. In this paper, an asynchronous BCI shared control method is proposed for the high DoF robotic grasping task. The proposed method combines BCI control and automatic robotic control to simultaneously consider the robotic vision feedback and revise the unreasonable control commands. The user can easily mentally control the system and is only required to intervene and send brain commands to the automatic control system at the appropriate time according to the experience of the user. Two experiments are designed to validate our method: one aims to illustrate the accuracy of MI pattern recognition of our asynchronous BCI system; the other is the online practical experiment that controls the robot to grasp a target while avoiding an obstacle using the asynchronous BCI shared control method that can improve the safety and robustness of our system.

Motor Imagery and Error Related Potential Induced Position Control of a Robotic Arm

The paper introduces an electroencephalography(EEG) driven online position control scheme for a robot arm by utilizing motor imagery to activate and error related potential(ErrP) to stop the movement of the individual links, following a fixed(pre-defined) order of link selection. The right(left)hand motor imagery is used to turn a link clockwise(counterclockwise) and foot imagery is used to move a link forward. The occurrence of ErrP here indicates that the link under motion crosses the visually fixed target position, which usually is a plane/line/point depending on the desired transition of the link across 3D planes/around 2D lines/along 2D lines respectively. The imagined task about individual link's movement is decoded by a classifier into three possible class labels: clockwise, counterclockwise and no movement in case of rotational movements and forward, backward and no movement in case of translational movements. One additional classifier is required to detect the occurrence of the ErrP signal, elicited due to visually inspired positional link error with reference to a geometrically selected target position. Wavelet coefficients and adaptive autoregressive parameters are extracted as features for motor imagery and ErrP signals respectively. Support vector machine classifiers are used to decode motor imagination and ErrP with high classification accuracy above 80%. The average time taken by the proposed scheme to decode and execute control intentions for the complete movement of three links of a robot is approximately33 seconds. The steady-state error and peak overshoot of the proposed controller are experimentally obtained as 1.1% and4.6% respectively.

A review of artificial intelligence for EEG-based brain-computer interfaces and applications

The advancement in neuroscience and computer science promotes the ability of the human brain to communicate and interact with the environment,making brain–computer interface(BCI)top interdisciplinary research.Furthermore,with the modern technology advancement in artificial intelligence(AI),including machine learning(ML)and deep learning(DL)methods,there is vast growing interest in the electroencephalogram(EEG)-based BCIs for AI-related visual,literal,and motion applications.In this review study,the literature on mainstreams of AI for the EEG-based BCI applications is investigated to fill gaps in the interdisciplinary BCI field.Specifically,the EEG signals and their main applications in BCI are first briefly introduced.Next,the latest AI technologies,including the ML and DL models,are presented to monitor and feedback human cognitive states.Finally,some BCI-inspired AI applications,including computer vision,natural language processing,and robotic control applications,are presented.The future research directions of the EEG-based BCI are highlighted in line with the AI technologies and applications.

A P300 based online brain-computer interface system for virtual hand control

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a communication system that can help lock-in patients to interact with the outside environment by translating brain signals into machine commands.The present work provides a design for a virtual reality (VR) based BCI system that allows human participants to control a virtual hand to make gestures by P300 signals,with a positive peak of potential about 300 ms posterior to the onset of target stimulus.In this virtual environment,the participants can obtain a more immersed experience with the BCI system,such as controlling a virtual hand or walking around in the virtual world.Methods of modeling the virtual hand and analyzing the P300 signals are also described in detail.Template matching and support vector machine were used as the P300 classifier and the experiment results showed that both algorithms perform well in the system.After a short time of practice,most participants could learn to control the virtual hand during the online experiment with greater than 70% accuracy.

Electroencephalogram-based brain-computer interface for the Chinese spelling system: a survey

Electroencephalogram （EEG） based brain-computer interfaces allow users to communicate with the external environment by means of their EEG signals, without relying on the brain＇s usual output pathways such as muscles. A popular application for EEGs is the EEG-based speller, which translates EEG signals into intentions to spell particular words, thus benefiting those suffering from severe disabilities, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Although the EEG-based English speller （EEGES） has been widely studied in recent years, few studies have focused on the EEG-based Chinese speller （EEGCS）. The EEGCS is more difficult to develop than the EEGES, because the English alphabet contains only 26 letters. By contrast, Chinese contains more than 11000 logographic characters. The goal of this paper is to survey the literature on EEGCS systems. First, the taxonomy of current EEGCS systems is discussed to get the gist of the paper. Then, a common framework unifying the current EEGCS and EEGES systems is proposed, in which the concept of EEG-based choice acts as a core component. In addition, a variety of current EEGCS systems are investigated and discussed to highlight the advances, current problems, and future directions for EEGCS.

脑机接口在机器人控制中的应用研究现状

本文首先介绍了脑机接口(BCI)系统,接着论述了近年来脑机接口在机器人控制中的应用研究现状,最后总结了当前研究存在的问题及发展方向。

脑机接口在机器人控制中的研究现状

脑机接口(brain-computer interface,BCI)是一种直接通过大脑与外部设备进行信息交流的技术。首先,介绍BCI系统的基本原理,BCI系统由信号采集、信号处理、输出设备和操作协议构成;其次,详述BCI的研究现状,重点介绍BCI在机器人假肢、轮式机器人及智能仿人机器人上的典型应用。最后指出:BCI这种非肌肉的通信与控制方法是可行的,这种方法可为无法使用传统方法的残障人士提供新的对外交流手段。

Multiple mental tasks classification based on nonlinear parameter of mean period using support vector machines

Mental task classification is one of the most important problems in Brain-computer interface.This paper studies the classification of five-class mental tasks.The nonlinear parameter of mean period obtained from frequency domain information was used as features for classification implemented by using the method of SVM(support vector machines).The averaged classification accuracy of 85.6% over 7 subjects was achieved for 2-second EEG segments.And the results for EEG segments of 0.5s and 5.0s compared favorably to those of Garrett's.The results indicate that the parameter of mean period represents mental tasks well for classification.Furthermore,the method of mean period is less computationally demanding,which indicates its potential use for online BCI systems.

Accurate Classification of EEG Signals Using Neural Networks Trained by Hybrid Populationphysic-based Algorithm

A brain-computer interface(BCI)system is one of the most effective ways that translates brain signals into output commands.Different imagery activities can be classified based on the changes inμandβrhythms and their spatial distributions.Multi-layer perceptron neural networks(MLP-NNs)are commonly used for classification.Training such MLP-NNs has great importance in a way that has attracted many researchers to this field recently.Conventional methods for training NNs,such as gradient descent and recursive methods,have some disadvantages including low accuracy,slow convergence speed and trapping in local minimums.In this paper,in order to overcome these issues,the MLP-NN trained by a hybrid population-physics-based algorithm,the combination of particle swarm optimization and gravitational search algorithm(PSOGSA),is proposed for our classification problem.To show the advantages of using PSOGSA that trains NNs,this algorithm is compared with other meta-heuristic algorithms such as particle swarm optimization(PSO),gravitational search algorithm(GSA)and new versions of PSO.The metrics that are discussed in this paper are the speed of convergence and classification accuracy metrics.The results show that the proposed algorithm in most subjects of encephalography(EEG)dataset has very better or acceptable performance compared to others.