Implementing Remote Presence Using Quadcopter Control by a Non-Invasive BCI Device

Extracting neural signals to control a quadcopter using wireless manner is proposed in this paper for hands-free, silence and effortless human-mobile interaction with remote presence. The brain activity is recorded in real-time and discovered patterns to relate it to facial-expression states with a cheap off-the-shelf electroencephalogram (EEG) headset-Emotic Epoc device. A tablet based mobile framework with Android system is developed to convert these discovered patterns into commands to drive the quadcopter-AR Drone 2.0 through wireless interface. First, neural signals are sequentially extracted from headset and transmitted to the tablet mobile system. In the tablet mobile system, large number of feature vector of EEG can be reduced by using Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to recognize the facial expression to generate suitable commands and driving the quadcopter through wireless interface. Finally, the quadcopter can fly smoothly in accordance with the commands converted by the EEG signals. The experimental results show that the proposed system can easily control quadcopters.