Mathematical, Computational, and Perceptual Foundations for Interactive Cyber-‐Physical Systems: Year One
Abstract
The objective of this research is to create interfaces that enable people with impaired sensory-‐motor function to control interactive cyber-‐physical systems such as artificial limbs, wheelchairs, automobiles, and aircraft. The approach is based on the premise that performance can be significantly enhanced merely by warping the perceptual feedback provided to the human user. A systematic way to design this feedback will be developed by addressing a number of underlying mathematical and computational challenges.
The intellectual merit lies in the way that perceptual feedback is constructed. Local performance criteria like stability and collision avoidance are encoded by potential functions, and gradients of these functions are used to warp the display. Global performance criteria like optimal navigation are encoded by conditional probabilities on a language of motion primitives, and metric embeddings of these probabilities are used to warp the display. Together, these two types of feedback facilitate improved safety and performance while still allowing the user to retain full control over the system.
If successful, this research could improve the lives of people suffering from debilitating physical conditions such as amputation or stroke and also could protect people like drivers or pilots that are impaired by transient conditions such as fatigue, boredom, or substance abuse.
Significant contributions include the following:
-
-‐ Results show that it is possible to formulate the problem of brain-‐machine interface design as the problem of deriving an optimal communication protocol that tells us exactly what type of perceptual feedback should be provided to the user. The utility of this approach has been demonstrated by enabling a human pilot to remotely teleoperate an unmanned aircraft flying at a fixed altitude with input only from an electroencephalograph.
-
-‐ Results show that “perception-‐to-‐behavior” stability, which captures the response of a human user to changes in perceptual feedback, is an appropriate measure of performance for mobile robot teleoperation.
Award ID: 0931871
Submitted by Timothy Bretl
on
Abstract
The objective of this research is to create interfaces that enable people with impaired sensory-‐motor function to control interactive cyber-‐physical systems such as artificial limbs, wheelchairs, automobiles, and aircraft. The approach is based on the premise that performance can be significantly enhanced merely by warping the perceptual feedback provided to the human user. A systematic way to design this feedback will be developed by addressing a number of underlying mathematical and computational challenges.
The intellectual merit lies in the way that perceptual feedback is constructed. Local performance criteria like stability and collision avoidance are encoded by potential functions, and gradients of these functions are used to warp the display. Global performance criteria like optimal navigation are encoded by conditional probabilities on a language of motion primitives, and metric embeddings of these probabilities are used to warp the display. Together, these two types of feedback facilitate improved safety and performance while still allowing the user to retain full control over the system.
If successful, this research could improve the lives of people suffering from debilitating physical conditions such as amputation or stroke and also could protect people like drivers or pilots that are impaired by transient conditions such as fatigue, boredom, or substance abuse.
Significant contributions include the following:
-
-‐ Results show that it is possible to formulate the problem of brain-‐machine interface design as the problem of deriving an optimal communication protocol that tells us exactly what type of perceptual feedback should be provided to the user. The utility of this approach has been demonstrated by enabling a human pilot to remotely teleoperate an unmanned aircraft flying at a fixed altitude with input only from an electroencephalograph.
-
-‐ Results show that “perception-‐to-‐behavior” stability, which captures the response of a human user to changes in perceptual feedback, is an appropriate measure of performance for mobile robot teleoperation.
Award ID: 0931871