Acting Thoughts: Towards a Mobile Robotic Service Assistant for
Users with Limited Communication Skills
Abstract
As autonomous service robots become more affordable and thus available also for the general public, there
is a growing need for user friendly interfaces to control the
robotic system. Currently available control modalities typically
expect users to be able to express their desire through either
touch, speech or gesture commands. While this requirement
is fulfilled for the majority of users, paralyzed users may not
be able to use such systems. In this paper, we present a novel
framework, that allows these users to interact with a robotic
service assistant in a closed-loop fashion, using only thoughts.
The system is composed of several interacting components, i.e.
non-invasive neuronal signal recording and decoding, high-level
task planning, motion and manipulation planning as well as
environment perception. In various experiments, we demonstrate its
applicability and robustness in real world scenarios,
considering fetch-and-carry tasks and tasks involving human-
robot interaction. As our results demonstrate, our system is
capable of adapting to frequent changes in the environment
and reliably completing given tasks within a reasonable amount
of time. Combined with high-level planning and autonomous
robotics, interesting new perspectives open up for non-invasive
BCI human-robot interactions.
