Brain Controlled Car Will Soon Be A Thing

Chinese specialists took their first personality controlled cruise on Wednesday, and this innovation appears to be really encouraging.

Researchers from China’s Nankai University in Tianjin premiered China’s first ever mind-controlled car, taking it for a test spin on Wednesday. The innovation appears to be piggybacking off ideas like Google’s Self-Driving Car project but may offer drivers more control over their vehicle. 

So how exactly does it work? According to state-owned news agency Xinhua, drivers wear a headset called the electroenecephalo-graph that has 16 sensors reading signals from your brain. As your brain thinks directions for the vehicle, the sensors interpret those brain signals in a recognition system that analyzes them and translates them into instructions that can be recognized by the car. 

“We connect our equipment with CAN (Controller Area Network) of the car for communication, which is a breakthrough because in the past the human brain signal can only control stuffs in visual environment or a simple thing like a wheelchair,” said Duan Feng, associate professor of computing and control engineering, as well as head researcher for the study, to state-controlled Chinese media, CCTV. 

So far, the car has been successfully able to interpret signals from the brain that allow it to move forward, in reverse, brake, start, lock, and unlock. Drivers can even open the car’s doors with their minds. The only thing the car cannot do is turn when the driver’s mind tells it to. 

“The technology is quite mature, however, there is some room for improvement concerning the car’s electronics, which will make the vehicle more secure, intelligent, and user-friendly,” Feng said, The Week reported. Feng and his team have partnered up with Great Wall Motor, challenging the self-driving technologies being developed by Google and Baidu. 

Another report by CCTV says that wearing the device “does not harm the human body.” In fact, safety is a top priority, and Feng and his team hope that their new technology may help disabled individuals to drive in the future. 

While an exciting development, this mind-controlled car is not the first of its kind. The first was actually developed in 2014 by German researchers at the Free University of Berlin. The car, known as the Brain Driver, uses a similar 16-sensor headset to send impulses form the driver’s brain to a program within the car. Roboticist Adalberto Llarena who worked to engineer the car tells BBC that the vehicle can interpret direct thoughts like “left” or “right” as well as more abstract directions, like wanting to go to a certain place.

Overall, German researchers say the greatest difficulty with operating a car like this is training the brain how to produce strong enough signals for the sensors to read. Similarly, The Weekreports that distractions like music or texting while operating the car can make driving more difficult, because it confuses the brain signals being emitted. Distractions like this in general, though, are always dangerous when behind the wheel. 

While cars that are driven by the mind or that can drive themselves may seem like a thing of the distant future, we are getting closer to this possibility every day. Even though there are still many kinks to work out, your next road trip may just be a cruise through the whims of your mind.