In this paper, we propose a new approach of detecting emergency braking intention for brain-controlled vehicles by interpreting electroencephalography (EEG) signals of drivers. Regularization linear discriminant analysis with spatial-frequency features is applied to build the detection model. These spatial-frequency features are selected from the powers of frequency points across sixteen channels by using the sequential forward floating search. Experimental results from twelve subjects show that on average, the proposed method can detect emergency braking intentions 420 ms after the onset of emergency situations with the system accuracy of over 94%, showing the feasibility of developing a practical system of detecting driver emergency braking intention with the power spectra of EEG signals for brain-controlled vehicles.

In this article, we develop a robust sliding-mode nonlinear predictive controller for brain-controlled robots with enhanced performance, safety, and robustness. First, the kinematics and dynamics of a mobile robot are built. After that, the proposed controller is developed by cascading a predictive controller and a smooth sliding-mode controller. The predictive controller integrates the human intention tracking with safety guarantee objectives into an optimization problem to minimize the invasion to human intention while maintaining robot safety. The smooth sliding-mode controller is designed to achieve robust desired velocity tracking. The results of human-in-the-loop simulation and robotic experiments both show the efficacy and robust performance of the proposed controller. This work provides an enabling design to enhance the future research and development of brain-controlled robots.

Using brain signals rather than limbs to drive a vehicle can help persons with disabilities to extend their movement range and, thus, to improve their self-independence. However, the driving performance of brain-controlled vehicles (BCVs) is poor. In this paper, to improve the performance of BCVs, we propose a new shared control method based on the model predictive control (MPC) strategy. Particularly, to maintain the maximum control authority of brain-control drivers while ensuring the safety of BCVs, the MPC controller is designed by introducing a penalty on the deviation from drivers output in the cost function and setting safety constraints. Driver-and-hardware-in-the-loop experiments are conducted under two road-keeping scenarios and one obstacle-avoidance scenario with different subjects to validate the proposed method. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in avoiding roadway departures and obstacles while maintaining the control authority of users.

Decoding human movement parameters from electroencephalograms (EEG) signals is of great value for human-machine collaboration. However, existing studies on hand movement direction decoding concentrate on the decoding of a single-hand movement direction from EEG signals given the opposite hand is maintained still. In practice, the cooperative movement of both hands is common. In this paper, we investigated the neural signatures and decoding of single-hand and both-hand movement directions from EEG signals. The potentials of EEG signals and power sums in the low frequency band of EEG signals from 24 channels were used as decoding features. The linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were used for decoding. Experimental results showed a significant difference in the negative offset maximums of movement-related cortical potentials (MRCPs) at electrode Cz between single-hand and both-hand movements. The recognition accuracies for six-class classification, including two single-hand and four both-hand movement directions, reached 70.29% ± 10.85% by using EEG potentials as features with the SVM classifier. These findings showed the feasibility of decoding single-hand and both-hand movement directions. This work can lay a foundation for the future development of an active human-machine collaboration system based on EEG signals and open a new research direction in the field of decoding hand movement parameters from EEG signals.

In this paper, to address the safety of brain-controlled vehicles under emergency situations, we propose a novel method of emergency situation detection by fusing driver electroencephalography (EEG) signals with surrounding information. We first build a novel EEG-based detection model of driver emergency braking intention. We then recognize emergency situations by fusing the result of the proposed EEG-based intention detection model with that of the obstacle detection model based on surrounding information. The real-time detection system of driver emergency braking intention is implemented on an embedded system, and the driver-and-hardware-in-the-loop-experiment of the proposed detection method of emergency situations is performed. Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect emergency situations with the system accuracy of 94.89%, false alarm rate of 0.05%, and response time of 540 ms. This paper has important values in the future development of brain-controlled vehicles, human-centric advanced driver assistant systems, and self-driving vehicles and opens a new avenue on how cognitive neuroscience may be applied to human–machine integration.