Design of an EEG-based Drone Swarm Control System using Endogenous BCI Paradigms

TL;DR

This paper presents the design of an EEG-based drone swarm control system utilizing endogenous BCI paradigms, demonstrating the feasibility of increasing control degrees of freedom with multiple mental imagery tasks.

Contribution

It introduces specialized endogenous BCI paradigms (MI, VI, SI) for drone swarm control and evaluates their classification performance with EEG signals.

Findings

Grand-averaged accuracies: MI 51.1%, VI 53.2%, SI 41.9%

Feasibility of using endogenous paradigms for drone control

Increased control flexibility for drone swarms

Abstract

Non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) has been developed for understanding users' intentions by using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. With the recent development of artificial intelligence, there have been many developments in the drone control system. BCI characteristic that can reflect the users' intentions led to the BCI-based drone control system. When using drone swarm, we can have more advantages, such as mission diversity, than using a single drone. In particular, BCI-based drone swarm control could provide many advantages to various industries such as military service or industry disaster. BCI Paradigms consist of the exogenous and endogenous paradigms. The endogenous paradigms can operate with the users' intentions independently of any stimulus. In this study, we designed endogenous paradigms (i.e., motor imagery (MI), visual imagery (VI), and speech imagery (SI)) specialized in drone swarm control, and EEG-based various task classifications related to drone swarm control were conducted. Five subjects participated in the experiment and the performance was evaluated using the basic machine learning algorithm. The grand-averaged accuracies were 51.1%, 53.2%, and 41.9% in MI, VI, and SI, respectively. Hence, we confirmed the feasibility of increasing the degree of freedom for drone swarm control using various endogenous paradigms.