ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF A FRAMEWORK FOR BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE AND VIBROTACTILE FEEDBACK FOR HUMAN-ROBOT-INTERACTION IN VIRTUAL SPACES AND ROBOTIC HARDWARE
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Date
2023-02-08Author
Hazra, Sudip
Whitaker, Shane
Shiakolas, Panos S.
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Show full item recordAbstract
Research in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) aims to understand
human intent with the goal to enhance Human-Robot
Interaction (HRI) especially in the field of assistive robotics. The
goal of this research is to develop a behavioral sequence based
framework to help persons with upper limb disabilities to maintain
self-dependence. The framework aims to operate in stages
and links multiple functional components to identify human intent
and control a robotic arm. The development, operation, and evaluation
of the framework and the linked functional components to
acquire, process, evaluate, and map BCI signals generated using
facial expressions and head movements to predefined actions will
be introduced.The framework will integrate multiple functional
components such as a non-invasive BCI control device, a vibrotactile
haptic feedback device, a visual feedback environment, the
evaluation and training platform, and a robotic arm. The robot
pick, move and place actions are mapped to different facial expressions
and presented using haptic and visual feedback to the
user for classified action verification before performing the process
using a robotic arm. The initial evaluation of the developed
framework was 100% successful with two volunteers who also
provided constructive feedback. The initial successful evaluation
provides confidence to further test the framework with more volunteers
to identify limitations and/or areas of improvement and
its application for further research in HRI as it applies to assistive
robotic systems.