Capstone News
Congratulation ECE Capstone Competition Winners
A team of four undergraduate students won the first place in this year's ECE Capstone Project Competition with their project on utilizing brain signals to navigate a mobile robot remotely. In this project, students Saumitro Dasgupta, Mike Fanton, Jonathan Pham, and Mike Willard worked with professors Deniz Erdogmus and Bahram Shafai to develop a brain interface based on signals called steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) to control a robot by selecting commands on the operator's screen to be transmitted via a wireless connection. The operator screen consisted of checkerboard patterns flickering at different frequencies - specifically one checkerboard per command - and a real-time video feedback from the robot's point-of-view using a camera mounted on the robot.
The basic principle behind the designed brain interface is that the visual cortex selectively focuses its processing power to the center of the person's visual field; consequently, when the operator directs eye gaze at a checkerboard pattern that represents the desired command, the visual cortex electrical activity couples with the flickering pattern of the visual stimulus, and energy at a matching frequency and its harmonics are induced. The frequency at which such increased energy occurs is then extracted from electroencephalography (EEG) measurements acquired by 10 electrodes positioned on the scalp around the occipital lobe at the back of the head where the visual cortex is found. The measurements are obtained in a completely noninvasive manner.
In the current implementation, the real-time video feedback from the robot is sent to the operator via Skype and the commands are transmitted to the robot via a remote connection to the laptop mounted on the robot which handles both robot control and video acquisition and transmission functions.
A short demonstration of the system in operation is available in this video:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/354802/MindCon.mp4
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/354802/MindCon%5BOriginal%5D.m4v
More News Articles about this Capstone Project can be found:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/your-brain-could-control-this-robot.html
http://www.northeastern.edu/news/stories/2010/06/brain_computer_interface.html