How Cerebionics Is Building Brain-Based Controls for Robots

Cerebionics wants to give people another way to direct machines: an EEG-based interface that interprets brain signals as commands for robots and drones. The ambition is not to reproduce every movement a joystick can make. It is to capture useful intent well enough that a machine can act on a higher-level instruction.23

From drawing robots to directing them

Founder Agnessa Pedersen’s interest in machine control predates the startup. Project Europe says she built a portrait-drawing robot arm at 16; Tech.eu also traces Cerebionics to the drawing robots she made as a teenager.122 The shift in her work is from getting a robot to replicate a physical action to exploring whether it can respond to an intended one.

Cerebionics describes its technology as using neural signals to control robots. Its website explains the proposed route from EEG sensors, through machine-learning interpretation, to robot commands.810 Reporting characterizes the interface as portable and non-invasive, with higher-level commands for robots and drones as its focus.3

Why calibration matters more than the headset alone

An EEG command channel has to do more than detect activity: it must distinguish an intended command from signals that should not trigger an action. Project Europe describes the approach as decoding motor imagery signals, but its account does not provide independent performance measurements.12 Reporting identifies software and reduced calibration as central challenges to scaling Cerebionics’ approach.3

That distinction matters for anyone assessing the product. A compelling demonstration does not, by itself, show how consistently the interface works across users and sessions, how often it issues an unintended command, or how quickly a connected machine responds. The supplied sources do not provide independently validated figures for those measures.

What testing in Ukraine shows—and what it does not

Tech.eu reports that Cerebionics has spent months testing and refining the platform with users in Ukraine. Pedersen has also said she spent much of a six-month period there working with end users under operational constraints; a separate account identifies Ukrainian military personnel among its testers.2116 Those accounts show that field feedback is part of development, not that performance in every intended setting has been established.

Cerebionics was selected for Project Europe’s first cohort in 2025, and Project Europe lists Pedersen as its founder.78 The company’s longer-term promise is an additional control channel when conventional controls are inconvenient or unavailable. For now, the evidence supports a portable EEG interface under development—not a proven replacement for a controller or a broadly deployable system.311