On NIRS-based brain-robot interface

Abstract

Constructing of flexible and intelligent human-robot interface that can catch the human intention correctly and lead to the success of the required tasks in complex environment by a robot has become a new challenging research subject. In this research, we proposed to apply NIRS (Near Infrared Spectroscopy) to measure the brain activities during the free body motion, we aim to use it as an interface to control the motion of robots directly in the near future. In detail, two basic types of experiments of a human subject are performed so as to distinguish the human brain activities in different tasks, one is the thinking task and another is during the subject’s body motions. For each type of experiment, we also set two different tasks. For the thinking experiment, we studied the tasks when the human subject is performing mathematic calculations and puzzles. For the experiment during body motions, we studied finger tapping and tongue extension tasks. As a result, although we couldn’t found the difference of the right and left brain activities in the different thinking experiments, we successfully caught the difference of brain activities for different body motions, which left us the possibility of NIRS as an important technology in constructing the brain-robot interface.