Motivation

Even if brain-machine or neurocontrolled technology is still in its early stage of development, the next decade promises systems that will be used in hospitals, schools, and homes and in many other different areas that this technology is rapidly reaching. Therefore, we posit that the combination of brain-machine-interfaces and robotics presents great potential and grand multi-faceted challenges. This is an important time in the development of the field, in which the broad technical community and the beneficiary populations must work together to shape the field toward its intended impact on improved human quality of life.

The objective of this workshop is two-folded. On the one hand, the intention is to gather researchers working in different areas of brain computer interfaces in order to give a broad panorama of the recent technological advances. On the other hand, the workshop will address researchers working in applications of brain machine control relevant for the robotics community. More precisely, the aims of this workshop include:

• To bring together researchers from multidisciplinary fields, so as to focus on the different aspects of the brain computer interfaces and their applications to robotics, and therefore being novel and complimentary to previous related workshops, which had a broader scope.
• To give a panorama to the robotics community of the basic technologies on brain computer interfaces.
• To discuss novel applications of neurocontrol such as neuroprostheses, brain actuated wheelchairs and brain teleoperated robots with the brain computer interface community to seek for fundamental solutions.
• To evaluate different experimental designs for brain-robot interaction in the assistive context.
• To provide a general overview of the critical issues and key points in building brain-machine devices and assistive applications and providing indications for further directions and developments in the field, based on the current diverse expertise of the participants.