Human-Centered Intelligent Vehicles: Toward Multimodal Interface Integration

78 1094-7167/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS avoidance technologies, enhance the driver’s ability to sense the surrounding environment. Driver assistance and automation technologies simulate the driver’s sensorimotor system to operate a vehicle either temporarily during emergencies or for prolonged periods. Such new information and control technologies that make vehicles smarter are arriving on the market as optional equipment or specialty after-market components. These technologies are being developed and marketed to increase driver safety, performance, and convenience. However, these disparate components require further significant integration efforts to create a coherent intelligent vehicle that complements the human driver, fully considering his or her requirements, capabilities, and limitations. A fully intelligent vehicle must work cooperatively with the driver.1 New, uncoordinated technologies could deliver excessive, competing, or contradictory messages and demands that might distract, confuse, and overwhelm the driver. This could cause an overload of the driver’s limited cognitive resources, thereby decreasing the driver’s performance and safety. An intelligent system senses its environment and acts to reach its objectives. So, its interaction and communication channels—that is, its interface—greatly influence the type of intelligence it can display. Primary requirements for a definition of a coherent intelligent system therefore include intrasystem integration (among all subsystems, including input/output if applicable) and intersystems integration (among the systems and environment, including the user if present). An integrated, coordinated system is thus a defining feature of a human-centered intelligent vehicle. Without it, the vehicle would simply be a container of potentially overlapping or conflicting technologies.