Human-robot cooperation through brain-computer interaction and emulated haptic supports

The study presented in this paper is in the context of providing a telepresence platform for people with tetraplegia, who may be confined to their room or bed. The eventual aim is to provide these people with a system that allows them to remotely control a robot, which can act as a medium for him/her in their everyday life, e.g. by enabling interactions with friends and relatives who may be located in other rooms or even remote places and exploring different environments. In this paper, we deal with the specific challenge of cooperation between a robot and a human, who is only able to control the device using thoughts alone. The system is therefore composed of a brain computer interface (BC1) and a visual interface to implement an “emulated haptic shared control” of the robot. The aim is to share motion control between the human and the robot according to the difficulty of the situation. The control schema that exploits this “emulated haptic feedback” has been designed and evaluated using human-machine cooperation (HMC) and has been compared with more standard controls. We report on an initial experiment that has been conducted to test the feasibility of the approach. Preliminary results highlight the interest of the approach but also the challenges that remain to be overcome.