Exploring the human-car bond through an Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA)

Abstract

As the amount of time spent inside vehicles increases, there is an ever more pressing need for safe interfaces that support drivers while they are multi-tasking. We present an Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA), a sociable robot designed to sit at the dashboard of a vehicle and behave as a friendly assistant. This highly expressive robot was designed to receive signals from the vehicle and use an Android phone as its face and main computational unit to manage the information that must be delivered to the driver. AIDA communicates with the driver through speech, imitating the interaction model that exists between a driver and another passenger. This research platform explores the possibility of using a sociable robot as an interface to connect driver and car, creating a stronger bond between them.