EEG-Driven Intention Decoding: Offline Deep Learning Benchmarking on a Robotic Rover
Authors: Ghadah Alosaimi, Maha Alsayyari, Yixin Sun, Stamos Katsigiannis, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei, Toby P. Breckon
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Saudi Arabia · Department of Computer Science, Durham University, UK · Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia · Department of Engineering, Durham University, UK
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide a hands-free control modality for mobile robotics, yet decoding user intent during real-world navigation remains challenging. This work presents a brain-robot control framework for offline decoding of driving commands during robotic rover operation. A 4WD Rover Pro platform was remotely operated by 12 participants who navigated a predefined route using a joystick, executing the commands forward, reverse, left, right, and stop. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded with a 16-channel OpenBCI cap and aligned with motor actions at Delta = 0 ms and future prediction horizons (Delta > 0 ms). After preprocessing, several deep learning models were benchmarked, including convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and Transformer architectures. ShallowConvNet achieved the highest performance for both action prediction and intent prediction. By combining real-world robotic control with multi-horizon EEG intention decoding, this study introduces a reproducible benchmark and reveals key design insights for predictive deep learning-based BCI systems.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Experimental setup for EEG-based driver intention prediction. EEG signals were acquired from the subject and synchronised with a first-person view of the route. Commands were sent via a controller and recorded for data labelling. The rover was equipped with a ZED stereo camera, GNSS antenna, Lux, and IMU sensors to capture multimodal information during the experimental route. The recorded data were processed through preparation and labelling pipelines before being used for driver intention decoding.
Family
Model
Purpose
Focus
Strengths
CNN
EEGNet [ 18 ]
Compact EEG decoding
Spatial-temporal features
Robust to noise; lightweight
DeepConvNet [ 33 ]
Deep feature extraction
Spatial-temporal features
Strong representation learning
ShallowConvNet [ 33 ]
Short-window EEG decoding
Temporal patterns
Interpretable filters; effective for MI
STNet [ 41 ]
Multi-channel EEG modelling
Spatial-temporal dependencies
Captures electrode interactions
TSCeption [ 8 ]
Frequency-aware EEG decoding
Temporal-spectral features
Multi-scale kernels
CCNN [ 37 ]
Real-time EEG classification
Low-latency processing
Lightweight; portable BCI suitability
TABLE I : Deep learning models evaluated for EEG classification, grouped by architecture family.
Fig. 2 : Aggregated confusion matrices for (a) ShallowConvNet, (b) GRU, and (c) EEGConformer, at Δ=0 ms.
Fig. 3 : Aggregated confusion matrices for (a) ShallowConvNet, (b) GRU, and (c) EEGConformer, at Δ=300 ms.
Action ( Δ=0 ms)
Intention ( Δ=300 ms )
Family
Model
Accuracy
Precision
Recall
F1
Accuracy
Precision
Recall
F1
CNN
EEGNet
0.78 ± 0.13
0.63 ± 0.11
0.70 ± 0.13
0.64 ± 0.12
0.77 ± 0.13
0.62 ± 0.10
0.68 ± 0.13
0.62 ± 0.12
DeepConvNet
0.33 ± 0.17
0.35 ± 0.14
0.35 ± 0.10
0.24 ± 0.12
0.32 ± 0.16
0.35 ± 0.14
0.35 ± 0.10
0.24 ± 0.12
ShallowConvNet
0.83 ± 0.11
0.67 ± 0.10
0.72 ± 0.12
0.67 ± 0.11
0.82 ± 0.11
0.65 ± 0.09
0.71 ± 0.12
0.66 ± 0.11
STNet
0.61 ± 0.15
0.46 ± 0.13
0.47 ± 0.14
0.46 ± 0.13
0.61 ± 0.15
0.46 ± 0.13
0.47 ± 0.14
0.45 ± 0.13
TSCeption
0.81 ± 0.11
0.62 ± 0.11
0.63 ± 0.12
0.62 ± 0.11
0.81 ± 0.10
0.63 ± 0.11
0.62 ± 0.11
0.62 ± 0.11
TABLE II : Model performance comparison at Δ=0 ms (action) and Δ=300 ms (intention).
Fig. 4 : F1-scores across all labelling horizons ( Δ∈[0,1000] ms) for all examined models.
Predicting driver intention from neurophysiological signals offers a promising pathway for enhancing proactive safety in advanced driver assistance systems, yet remains challenging in real-world driving due to EEG signal non-stationarity and the complexity of cognitive-motor preparation. This study proposes and evaluates an EEG-based driver intention prediction framework using a synchronised multi-sensor platform integrated into a real electric vehicle. A real-world on-road dataset was collected across 32 driving sessions, and 12 deep learning architectures were evaluated under consistent experimental conditions. Among the evaluated architectures, TSCeption achieved the highest average accuracy (0.907) and Macro-F1 score (0.901). The proposed framework demonstrates strong temporal stability, maintaining robust decoding performance up to 1000 ms before manoeuvre execution with minimal degradation. Furthermore, additional analyses reveal that minimal EEG preprocessing outperforms artefact-handling pipelines, and prediction performance peaks within a 400-600 ms interval, corresponding to a critical neural preparatory phase preceding driving manoeuvres. Overall, these findings support the feasibility of early and stable EEG-based driver intention decoding under real-world on-road conditions. Code: https://github.com/galosaimi/Mind2Drive.
Ghadah Alosaimi, Hanadi Alhamdan, Wenke E +3
Department of Computer Science, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Saudi Arabia · Department of {2Computer Science, 3Engineering}, Durham University, UK · Department of Computer Science, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia
We present a framework that integrates EEG-based visual and motor imagery (VI/MI) with robotic control to enable real-time, intention-driven grasping and placement. Motivated by the promise of BCI-driven robotics to enhance human-robot interaction, this system bridges neural signals with physical control by deploying offline-pretrained decoders in a zero-shot manner within an online streaming pipeline. This establishes a dual-channel intent interface that translates visual intent into robotic actions, with VI identifying objects for grasping and MI determining placement poses, enabling intuitive control over both what to grasp and where to place. The system operates solely on EEG via a cue-free imagery protocol, achieving integration and online validation. Implemented on a Base robotic platform and evaluated across diverse scenarios, including occluded targets or varying participant postures, the system achieves online decoding accuracies of 40.23% (VI) and 62.59% (MI), with an end-to-end task success rate of 20.88%. These results demonstrate that high-level visual cognition can be decoded in real time and translated into executable robot commands, bridging the gap between neural signals and physical interaction, and validating the flexibility of a purely imagery-based BCI paradigm for practical human-robot collaboration.
Yichang Liu, Tianyu Wang, Ziyi Ye +4
Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence (ISTBI), Fudan University · School of Data Science, Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute +3
Motor kinematics prediction (MKP) from electroencephalography (EEG) is an important research area for developing movement-related brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). While traditional methods often rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or recurrent neural networks (RNNs), Transformer-based models have shown strong ability in modeling long sequential EEG data. In this study, we propose a CNN-attention hybrid model for decoding hand kinematics from EEG during grasp-and-lift tasks, achieving strong performance in within-subject experiments. We further extend this approach to EEG-EMG multimodal decoding, which yields substantially improved results. Within-subject tests achieve PCC values of 0.9854, 0.9946, and 0.9065 for the X, Y, and Z axes, respectively, computed on the midpoint trajectory between the thumb and index finger, while cross-subject tests result in 0.9643, 0.9795, and 0.5852. The decoded trajectories from both modalities are then used to control a Franka Panda robotic arm in a MuJoCo simulation. To enhance trajectory fidelity, we introduce a copilot framework that filters low-confidence decoded points using a motion-state-aware critic within a finite-state machine. This post-processing step improves the overall within-subject PCC of EEG-only decoding to 0.93 while excluding fewer than 20% of the data points.
Yizhe Li, Shixiao Wang, Jian K. Liu
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom · University of Birmingham