A simple platform of brain-controlled mobile robot and its implementation by SSVEP

Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) is an emerging technology to translate non-invasively measured brain signals into commands, providing an additional communication channel. This paper develops a BCI platform to remotely control a mobile robot through the Internet. The platform consists of a server computer for EEG signal acquisition and signal processing/classification and a bluetooth controlled robot carrying an Android smartphone. The smartphone can give a visual feedback via the Internet to the user with its phone camera. The Android smartphone transfers the command from the server to the robot and transmits video stream to the server for the feedback to the user. It is also shown to employ the steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) to classify commands. We propose a method for detecting the idle state when a user does not gaze any visual stimuli.