From the decoding of cortical activities to the control of a JACO robotic arm: a whole processing chain

This paper presents a complete processing chain for decoding intracranial data recorded in the cortex of a monkey and replicates the associated movements on a JACO robotic arm by Kinova. We developed specific modules inside the OpenViBE platform in order to build a Brain-Machine Interface able to read the data, compute the position of the robotic finger and send this position to the robotic arm. More precisely, two client/server protocols have been tested to transfer the finger positions: VRPN and a light protocol based on TCP/IP sockets. According to the requested finger position, the server calls the associated functions of an API by Kinova to move the fingers properly. Finally, we monitor the gap between the requested and actual fingers positions. This chain can be generalized to any movement of the arm or wrist.