On the Engineering and Control of a Robotic Arm via Brain Computer Interfaces

In this work, we have designed and prototyped a robotic arm controllable via Brain Computer Interface (BCI), enabling a subject to drive the robotic arm by mean of a specific set of mental tasks. This setting can be used for several applications, in particular in this work we focused in moving objects between different tiles of a chessboard. The BCI we used to control the robotic arm relies on Electroencephalography (EEG), a brain monitoring technique in which a set of electrodes record the electric potential on the subject scalp. The EEG signals are then processed and classified in order to understand the task performed by the subject. Specifically, we used BCI paradigms that are based on signals related to visual stimuli. The obtained prototype shows already its functionality and could be extended to other applications in future works.