In the past May 14th, Bruno Ferreira presented a part of CoDRI’s work at the XVIII COTEC Europe Summit, which aimed to bring together business leaders, academia and policy decision makers to discuss how to proceed in the most concrete and agile way towards a new path for the future of European competitiveness.

Here, he was able to showcase one of CoDRI’s most recent contributions – EEG-triggered Awareness for a Collaborative Robot. This work was recently accepted for publication in Exp.at 2025, an IEEE sponsored conference which is set to take place in the island of Faial, Portugal, this coming September. Envisioning automated safety procedures, itt proposes the usage of an attention score based on alpha wave activity, obtained via a single-channel EEG BCI, as indicative of human awareness towards robot movement. Here, the robot was set to track the person’s movement during a task, idealizing an industrial collaborative scenario, while they are considered aware. Otherwise, the robot should halt so as to ensure no harm may come to a worker oblivious of their surroundings.

The demonstration went perfectly, allowing us to demonstrate how human signalling can indeed be used to modulate cobot behavior, with advantages towards human well-being. It is our hope that more events like this will help us spark interest in robot adaptation through integration of neuronal and psychological data, towards better, more-human like interactions with robotic agents.

If you want to find out more, read this work’s detailed post.