An Exploration of the Utilization of Electroencephalography and Neural Nets to Control Robots

摘要

It has long been known that as neurons fire within the brain they produce measurable electrical activity. Electroencephalography (EEG) is the measurement and recording of these electrical signals using sensors arrayed across the scalp. The idea of Brain-Computer interfaces (BCIs), which allow the control of devices using brain signals, naturally present themselves to many extremely useful applications including prosthetic devices, restoring or aiding in communication and hearing, military applications, video gaming and virtual reality, and robotic control, and have the possibility of significantly improving the quality of life of many disabled individuals. The purpose of this research is to examine an off the shelf EEG system, the Emotiv EPOC? System, as a cost-effective gateway to non-invasive portable EEG measurements and to build a BCI to control a robot, the Parallax Scribbler?. We built middleware to interpret the outputs from the Emotiv and map them into commands for the Scribbler robot.