Reducing Driver Task Load and Promoting Sociability through an Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA)

This work outlines the development of an Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA), a social robot that sits in a vehicle’s dashboard and behaves as a friendly assistant. This highly expressive robot uses an Android smartphone as its face, which serves as the main computational unit for the system. AIDA determines what information may be relevant to the driver, delivers it at the most appropriate time, and resolves which expressions should be used when doing so. An evaluation was performed in which participants completed mock driving tasks with the aid of 1) a smartphone with apps, 2) AIDA as a static, expressive agent, or 3) AIDA as a mobile robot. Results showed that the AIDA robot helped reduce user task load and promoted more sociability with users better than the smartphone or AIDA as a static agent.