Towards multi-user brain-robot interfaces for humanoid robot control

Brain-controlled robots as a “surrogate presence” for humans may appear only a vision to date. However, the field of brain-robot interfacing is making rapid progress. Humanoid robots are ideal candidates for providing such a “surrogate presence”, because they have the same embodiment as humans. Telepresence scenarios, such as “virtual” meetings, imply that not only one robot controlled by one human user is present, but that several users interact with each other mediated by their robots. Inspired by this scenario, we present a multi-user brain-robot interface, where currently two users control one humanoid robot each and interact with each other in a shared space. Brain-control is based on an asynchronous, dynamic and hybrid EEG-based brain-robot interface. We investigated two types of interaction: collaboration and competition. System performance was evaluated in a user study with 12 participants. Our results show that all users are capable of controlling the robots in the complex tasks. The complexity, however, imposes a high cognitive load that hampers focusing on the interaction with the other user.