Brain Computer Interface Robotic Co-Workers: Defective Part Picking System

Industrial robotic co-workers are robots that can work with human being in an unstructured environment. Such robots, must be able to assist human operators in a seamless way without receiving specific instructions. Robotic co-workers can open entirely new application fields in manufacturing as demonstrated in this paper. We designed such an industrial co-robot to pick up defective parts by simply monitoring a human operator directly through a brain computer interface (BCI). By constantly monitoring the operator using BCI sensors, the robotic co-worker can sense when an operator notices a defective part and then moves to remove the part from a moving conveyor with no direct instruction from the operator. The robot, equipped with an RGB camera, recognizes the part, tracks the position and generates accurate motion plan. We demonstrated the system using a human subject study.