Tractor Assistant Driving Control Method Based on EEG Combined With RNN-TL Deep Learning Algorithm

Nowadays, fieldwork is often accompanied by tight schedules, which tends to strain the shoulder muscles due to high-intensity work. Moreover, it is difficult and stressful for the disabled to drive agricultural machinery. Besides, current artificial intelligence technology could not fully realize tractor autonomous driving because of a high uncertain filed environment and short interruptions of satellite navigation signal shaded by trees. To reduce manual operations, a tractor assistant driving control method was proposed based on the human-machine interface utilizing the electroencephalographic (EEG) signal. First, the EEG signals of the tractor drivers were collected by a low-cost brain-computer interface (BCI), followed by denoising using a wavelet packet. Then the spectral features of EEG signals were calculated and extracted as the input of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Finally, the EEG-aided RNN driving model was trained for tractor driving robot control such as straight going, brake, left turn, and right turn operations, which control accuracy was 94.5% and time cost was 0.61 ms. Also, 8 electrodes were selected by the PCA algorithm for the design of a portable EEG controller. And the control accuracy reached 93.1% with the time cost of 0.48 ms. To solve the incomplete driving data set in the actual world because some driving manners may cause dangerous or even death, RNN-TL algorithm was employed by creating the complete driving data in the virtual environment followed by transferring the driving control experience to the actual world with small actual driving data set in the field, which control accuracy was 93.5% and time consumption was 0.48 ms. The experimental results showed the feasibility of the proposed tractor driving control method based on EEG signal combined with RNN-TL deep learning algorithm which can work with the displacement error less than 6.7 mm when the tractor speed is less than 50 km/h.