EEG-Based Detection of Braking Intention During Simulated Driving

Abstract

Accurately detecting and identifying drivers’ braking intention is the basis of man-machine driving. This paper proposed an electroencephalographic (EEG)-based braking intention measurement strategy. We used the Car Learning to Act (Carla) platform to build the simulated driving environment. 11 subjects participated in our study, and each subject drove a simulated vehicle to complete emergency braking and normal braking tasks. We compared the EEG topographic maps in different braking situations and used three different classifiers to predict the subjects’ braking intention through EEG signals. The results of the experiment showed that the grand-average response time of all subjects in emergency braking was 762 ms; emergency braking and no braking can be well distinguished, while normal braking and no braking were not easy to be classified; for the two different types of braking, emergency braking and normal braking had obvious differences in EEG topographic maps, and the classification results also showed that the two were highly distinguishable. This study provides a user-centered driver-assistance system and a good framework to combine with advanced shared control algorithms, which has the potential to be applied to achieve a more friendly interaction between the driver and vehicle in real driving environment. An earlier version of this work Liang et al. (2022) has been presented as preprint in arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12669).