Brain-controlled telepresence robot by motor-disabled people

Abstract

In this paper we present the first results of users with disabilities in mentally controlling a telepresence robot, a rather complex task as the robot is continuously moving and the user must control it for a long period of time (over 6 minutes) to go along the whole path. These two users drove the telepresence robot from their clinic more than 100 km away. Remarkably, although the patients had never visited the location where the telepresence robot was operating, they achieve similar performances to a group of four healthy users who were familiar with the environment. In particular, the experimental results reported in this paper demonstrate the benefits of shared control for brain-controlled telepresence robots. It allows all subjects (including novel BMI subjects as our users with disabilities) to complete a complex task in similar time and with similar number of commands to those required by manual control.