This paper explores the feasibility of employing EEG-based intention detection for real-time robot assistive control. We focus on predicting and distinguishing motor intentions of left/right arm movements by presenting: i) an offline data collection and training pipeline, used to train a classifier for left/right motion intention prediction, and ii) an online real-time prediction pipeline leveraging the trained classifier and integrated with an assistive robot. Central to our approach is a rich feature representation composed of the tangent space projection of time-windowed sample covariance matrices from EEG filtered signals and derivatives; allowing for a simple SVM classifier to achieve unprecedented accuracy and real-time performance. In pre-recorded real-time settings (160 Hz), a peak accuracy of 86.88% is achieved, surpassing prior works. In robot-in-the-loop settings, our system successfully detects intended motion solely from EEG data with 70% accuracy, triggering a robot to execute an assistive task. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed classifier.

We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds, e.g., estimated from data in practice. We first propose robust output control barrier functions (ROCBFs) as a means to guarantee safety, as defined through controlled forward invariance of a safe set. We then formulate an optimization problem to learn ROCBFs from expert demonstrations that exhibit safe system behavior, e.g., data collected from a human operator or an expert controller. When the parametrization of the ROCBF is linear, then we show that, under mild assumptions, the optimization problem is convex. Along with the optimization problem, we provide verifiable conditions in terms of the density of the data, smoothness of the system model and state estimator, and the size of the error bounds that guarantee validity of the obtained ROCBF. Towards obtaining a practical control algorithm, we propose an algorithmic implementation of our theoretical framework that accounts for assumptions made in our framework in practice. We empirically validate our algorithm in the autonomous driving simulator CARLA and demonstrate how to learn safe control laws from RGB camera images.