Researchers from the Nankai University of Tianjin, a city in the North East of China, have successfully developed what they call “the first car that uses nothing but brain power to drive,” Reuters reports.
By sending EEG (electroencephalogram) signals from his mind, and with the help of a software that translates them into relevant commands, a driver is be able to control the car to go forward, backwards, come to a stop, and both lock and unlock the vehicle, researcher Zhang Zhao said.
While the concept is certainly fascinating, it is unclear what the benefits of such a technology could be. Not only because of the current limitations: for the time being, the vehicle can only drive in a straight direction, and there are no plans to put it into production any time soon.
But also because using your mind to control a car might not be the most effective solution, after all. In fact, the system was designed considering two main possible applications: to help disabled people who are unable to use their hands or feet to drive, and secondly, “to provide healthy people with a new and more intellectualized driving mode,” as Zhang maintained.
However, as autonomous vehicles become less and less science-fiction and closer to reality, it’s not easy to tell why brain-controlled cars should be more appealing than, say, a self-driving car with vocal commands or programmed in advance to follow a certain route.
Actually, the latter solutions are already being developed in certain laboratories (for instance, at the MIT Labs in Singapore), in order to fulfil the needs of old people that are no longer able to drive alone, but need a mean of transportation to satisfy their basic needs, like reaching the nearest shop, or going to the nearest hospital for a quick check.
There might be cases, of course, in which the level of interaction that the driver can afford is so low that using the mind to control the vehicle could prove to be the one and only option. But in general, it seems easier to conceive the use of this driving technique more as a complement to another solution, rather than a stand-alone application.
Indeed, the authors of the project seem to agree on that: according to Reuters, Associate Professor Duan Feng, who led the project, emphasized that it might soon be possible to combine brain controlled technology and driverless cars like the Google GOOGL -1.72% Self Driving Car. This indeed might make sense, as it would allow the humans to keep a certain control of the vehicle, while minimizing the need for intervention, and the effort required.
When it comes to self-driving, what scares people most is perhaps the idea of losing control, of relying only on a machine. But imagine if you could change direction of halt the car just with the power of your thoughts. This might change the scenario.
As Duan told Reuters, “In the end, cars, whether driverless or not, and machines are serving for people. Under such circumstances, people’s intentions must be recognized.”
Whatever the final outcome will be, what Chinese researchers have achieved remains rather impressive, although perhaps not entirely new: as Techinsider points out, in 2011, researchers at the AutoNOMOS research team of the Artificial Intelligence Group at the Freie Universitaet (Free University) demonstrated similar technology in a modified Volkswagen Passat.
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