EMG-based BCI for PiCar Mobilization

Abstract

In this study, the main scope was to develop a brain-computer interface (BCI) with the use of PiCar and EEG/ERP devices. Thus, it is aimed to facilitate the lives of people with certain diseases and disabilities. The ultimate goal of this project has been to direct and control a BCI-based PiCar concerning the signals captured via the EEG/ERP device. With the EEG headset, the EMG signals of the gestures (facial expressions) of the participant were captured. With the collected data, filtering and other preprocessing methods were applied to have noise-free signals. In the preprocessing, the detrending method was used to clean the data set which showed a constantly increasing trend, to a certain range, and zero trends. The denoising (Wavelet Denoising) and outlier detection/elimination methods (OneClassSVM) were used for noise elimination. The SMOTE oversampling method was used for data augmentation. Welch's method was used to get band powers from the signals. With the use of augmented data, several machine learning algorithms were applied such as Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Random forest Classifier, Gradient Boosting Classifier, Multinomial Naive Bayes, Decision tree, K-Nearest Neighbor, and voting classifier. The developed models were used to predict the direction that is passed as an input to PiCar's API. After that, PiCar was controlled concerning the predicted direction with HTTP GET requests. In this project, the OpenBCI headset and the Brainflow library for EEG/EMG signal obtaining and processing were used. Also, the Tkinter library was used for the Graphical user interface and Django for establishing a server on PiCar's brain which is RaspberryPi.