Navigation Assistance for a BCI-controlled Humanoid Robot

We present an assisted navigation scheme designed to control a humanoid robot via a brain computer interface in order to let it interact with the environment and with humans. The interface is based on the well-known steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP) and the stimuli are integrated into the live feedback from the robot embedded camera displayed on a Head Mounted Display (HMD). One user controlled the HRP-2 humanoid robot in an experiment designed to measure the performance of the new navigation scheme based on visual SLAM feedback. The new navigation scheme performance is tested in an experience where the user is asked to navigate to a certain location in order to perform a task. It results that without the navigation assistance it is much more difficult to reach the appropriate pose for performing the task. The detailed results of the experiments are reported in this paper, and we discuss the possible improvements of our novel scheme.