Neurocognitive Patterns

Robots have the potential to be a potent force multiplier in both combat and non-combat situations. They can go into dangerous and hostile environments; perform searches in spaces that are inaccessible to humans; and exhibit strength exceeding the strongest human. This extreme potential has yet to be realized, however, because of the effort required for human operators to control robots. A large part of the difficulty lies in the human-robot interface. Most current robots are controlled via teleoperations. This not only ties up the operators'attention, it also ties up their hands. What is needed is a natural, hands-free human-robot interface that allows the operator to focus on events in the environment rather than on the specifics of a robot control system. Our team proposes a Neurocognitive Patterns (NCP). NCP will provide an innovative brain-computer interface (BCI) for robot navigation that combines recent advances in identifying the neural signals of motor intent with technology that exploits environmental and contextual information to provide likely interpretations for those neural signals. This will result in a new generation of robot control systems that will require dramatically less attention from the operator, freeing the operator to attend to other mission-important tasks.