EEG-Controlled Wall-Crawling Cleaning Robot Using SSVEP-Based Brain-Computer Interface

The assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative applications of EEG-based robot control and navigation are undergoing a major transformation in dimension as well as scope. Under the background of artificial intelligence, medical and nonmedical robots have rapidly developed and have gradually been applied to enhance the quality of people’s lives. We focus on connecting the brain with a mobile home robot by translating brain signals to computer commands to build a brain-computer interface that may offer the promise of greatly enhancing the quality of life of disabled and able-bodied people by considerably improving their autonomy, mobility, and abilities. Several types of robots have been controlled using BCI systems to complete real-time simple and/or complicated tasks with high performances. In this paper, a new EEG-based intelligent teleoperation system was designed for a mobile wall-crawling cleaning robot. This robot uses crawler type instead of the traditional wheel type to be used for window or floor cleaning. For EEG-based system controlling the robot position to climb the wall and complete the tasks of cleaning, we extracted steady state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) from the collected electroencephalography (EEG) signal. The visual stimulation interface in the proposed SSVEP-based BCI was composed of four flicker pieces with different frequencies (e.g., 6 Hz, 7.5 Hz, 8.57 Hz, and 10 Hz). Seven subjects were able to smoothly control the movement directions of the cleaning robot by looking at the corresponding flicker using their brain activity. To solve the multiclass problem, thereby achieving the purpose of cleaning the wall within a short period, the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) classification algorithm had been used. Offline and online experiments were held to analyze/classify EEG signals and use them as real-time commands. The proposed system was efficient in the classification and control phases with an obtained accuracy of 89.92% and had an efficient response speed and timing with a bit rate of 22.23 bits/min. These results suggested that the proposed EEG-based clean robot system is promising for smart home control in terms of completing the tasks of cleaning the walls with efficiency, safety, and robustness.