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.