Robots for physical Human-Robot Collaboration (pHRC) systems need to change their behavior and how they operate in consideration of several factors, such as the performance and intention of a human co-worker and the capabilities of different human-co-workers in collision avoidance and singularity of the robot operation. As the system's admittance becomes variable throughout the workspace, a potential solution is to tune the interaction forces and control the parameters based on the operator's requirements. To overcome this issue, we have demonstrated a novel closed-loop-neuroadaptive framework for pHRC. We have applied cognitive conflict information in a closed-loop manner, with the help of reinforcement learning, to adapt to robot strategy and compare this with open-loop settings. The experiment results show that the closed-loop-based neuroadaptive framework successfully reduces the level of cognitive conflict during pHRC, consequently increasing the smoothness and intuitiveness of human-robot collaboration. These results suggest the feasibility of a neuroadaptive approach for future pHRC control systems through electroencephalogram (EEG) signals.

Electroencephalography (EEG) measures the electrical brain activity in real-time by using sensors placed on the scalp. Artifacts, due to eye movements and blink, muscular/cardiac activity and generic electrical disturbances, have to be recognized and eliminated to allow a correct interpretation of the useful brain signals (UBS) of EEG. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is effective to split the signal into independent components (ICs) whose re-projections on 2D scalp topographies (images), also called topoplots, allow to recognize/separate artifacts and by UBS. Until now, IC topoplot analysis, a gold standard in EEG, has been carried on visually by human experts and, hence, not usable in automatic, fast-response EEG. We present a completely automatic and effective framework for EEG artifact recognition by IC topoplots, based on 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), capable to divide topoplots in 4 classes: 3 types of artifacts and UBS. The framework setup is described and results are presented, discussed and compared with those obtained by other competitive strategies. Experiments, carried on public EEG datasets, have shown an overall accuracy of above 98%, employing 1.4 sec on a standard PC to classify 32 topoplots, that is to drive an EEG system of 32 sensors. Though not real-time, the proposed framework is efficient enough to be used in fast-response EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) and faster than other automatic methods based on ICs.