Forget Autopilot! You Could Be Driving Your Car with Your Mind Instead

The news lately has been inundated with stories of self-driving cars and driver-assist systems leading to tragedies. Sure, almost every case that comes up is actually the result of human fallibility, but that doesn’t stop regulators, automakers, and that guy at the bar from arguing over the correct level of autonomous driving. What if autonomy was taken out of the equation, but you still didn’t have to lift your hands all the way up and onto the steering wheel?

That’s what YouTuber Michael Reeves built, at least partially, with his mind-controlled car. His system doesn’t actually steer the car, because that would require the kind of fine adjustment that just isn’t possible with mind control headsets — particularly the $30 model Reeves used. What it does do is operate the car’s accelerator pedal, and it does so just by reading Reeves’ brain waves.

The kind of mind control headset that Reeves used works by monitoring brain waves, which vary in frequency depending on the wearer’s mental state. In this case, focusing on anything causes the car to accelerate, and relaxing releases the accelerator. The headset monitors those waves, and a computer interprets them. The computer then tells an Arduino to toggle a relay, and that relay opens a solenoid valve on an air line going to a pneumatic actuator attached to the gas pedal. With this setup, Reeves is able to control the car’s accelerator just by thinking in the right way. It’s jerky, and probably very unsafe (does panic count as focus?), but it works!