DelPreto, J., Salazar-Gomez, A. F., Gil, S., Hasani, R., Guenther, F. H., & Rus, D. (2020). Plug-and-play supervisory control using muscle and brain signals for real-time gesture and error detection. Autonomous Robots, 44(7), 1303–1322. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-020-09916-x
Effective human supervision of robots can be key for ensuring correct robot operation in a variety of potentially safety-critical scenarios. This paper takes a step towards fast and reliable human intervention in supervisory control tasks by combining two streams of human biosignals: muscle and brain activity acquired via EMG and EEG, respectively. It presents continuous classification of left and right hand-gestures using muscle signals, time-locked classification of error-related potentials using brain signals (unconsciously produced when observing an error), and a framework that combines these pipelines to detect and correct robot mistakes during multiple-choice tasks. The resulting hybrid system is evaluated in a “plug-and-play” fashion with 7 untrained subjects supervising an autonomous robot performing a target selection task. Offline analysis further explores the EMG classification performance, and investigates methods to select subsets of training data that may facilitate generalizable plug-and-play classifiers.