SBIR-STTR Award

Future military engagements demand the use of robotic agents alongside warfighters during field operation. Beyond effectively interacting with each other, such agents must be able to seamlessly accept complex commands and mission directives from their manned counterparts. The current generation of man-machine interface technologies, however, falls well short of the necessary robustness, precision, and ease-of-use necessary for a soldier to effectively command such units during military missions. Think-A-Move, Ltd. has teamed with The Naval Postgraduate School, Case Western Reserve University, and Southern Illinois University, to propose the development of an unobtrusive sensor-based control system for human-machine interface to command military platforms. Leveraging past successes in generating control signals from physiological recording and processing, the interface will be capable of directing robotic devices in response to tongue movement and/or speech without insertion of any device in the vicinity of the oral cavity. Phase I work will: 1) design and simulate a candidate solder-machine interface system, 2) design signal processing and filtering algorithms to map physiological disturbance, 3) develop speech interfaces for performance augmentation, and 4) demonstrate the soldier-machine interface on a robotic hardware platform

Think-A-Move, Ltd. (TAM), in conjunction with the Naval Postgraduate School, Case Western Reserve University, and Southern Illinois University, proposes the revolutionary development of a human-machine interface command and control package applicable for soldier tele-operation of semi-autonomous military robots. This work will produce an efficient, flexible, and robust human-machine interface system, capable of directing robotic units performing military missions, without debilitating, hampering, or interfering with a warfighterís field operations. To realize this goal, Think-A-Move introduces an unobtrusive method for detecting tongue movement and speech, and generating a control instruction corresponding to each in real-time. This method consists of monitoring air pressure within the human ear, and subsequently providing control instruction corresponding to specific initiating actions. Tongue movements within the oral cavity and speech create unique, traceable pressure changes in the human ear, which can be measured with a simple sensor (i.e. a microphone) and analyzed to produce commands signals, which can in turn be used for robot tele-operation. Any one, or combinations of these actions, may be mapped for seamless control of robotic devices without any external physical motion, constraints, or bulky equipment. Think-A-Move technology allows the unique advantage of providing complementing interface architectures in one simple device.

Keywords:
Hands-Free Control, Robotics, Ear Output Signals, Pattern Detection,