Situational awareness is the key to effective navigation in traffic. Although existing robot systems are capable of robustly performing many elements of the navigation task (e.g. road following and car tracking), integrating these aspects into a competent driving system requires a higher-level understanding of the driving domain. I propose to build a reasoning system, SAPIENT (Situational Aware...

Differences in perceptual and cognitive abilities between the young and elderly have implications for in-car tasks. As a primary example, although in-car navigation systems enhance situational awareness, this comes at the cost of increasing visual distraction and cognitive load. To address these shortcomings, this paper explores the efficacy of multi-modal cues for providing route guidance info...

Car safety measures can be most effective when the cars on a street coordinate their control actions using distributed cooperative control. While each car optimizes its navigation planning locally to ensure the driver reaches his destination, all cars coordinate their actions in a distributed way in order to minimize the risk of safety hazards and collisions. These systems control the physical ...

The objective of this study was to identify task and vehicle factors that may affect driver situation awareness (SA) and its relationship to performance, particularly in strategic (navigation) tasks. An experiment was conducted to assess the effects of in-vehicle navigation aids and reliability on driver SA and performance in a simulated navigation task. A total of 20 participants drove a virtu...

Advances in the miniaturization and embedding of electronics for microcomputing, communication and sensor/actuator systems, have fertilized the pervasion of technology into literally everything. Pervasive computing technology is particularly flourishing in the automotive domain, exceling the “smart car”, embodying intelligent control mechanics, intelligent driver assistance, safety and comfort ...

Car safety measures can be most effective when the cars on a street coordinate their control actions using distributed cooperative control. While each car optimizes its navigation planning locally to ensure the driver reaches his destination, all cars coordinate their actions in a distributed way in order to minimize the risk of safety hazards and collisions. These systems control the physical ...

This paper describes a novel noise robust speech detection algorithm that can operate reliably in severe car noisy conditions. High performance has been obtained with the following techniques: (1) noise suppression based on principal component analysis for pre-processing, (2) robust endpoint detection using dynamic parameters [1] and (3) speech verification using periodicity of voiced signals w...

Speech recognition is seen to be of great benefit in on-board car navigation systems and assistance. The command word approach will be used for applications in the near future since the small active vocabulary and the hierarchical structure is much easier to cope with, from the developers’ side. An alternative approach, using spontaneous speech input, is far more complex but provides the user w...

In this paper, we present an approach towards mapping and safe navigation in real, large-scale environments with an autonomous car. The goal is to enable the car to autonomously navigate on roads while avoiding obstacles and while simultaneously learning an accurate three-dimensional model of the environment. To achieve these goals, we apply probabilistic state estimation techniques, network-ba...

This paper describes our latest efforts in building a speech recognizer for operating a navigation system through speech instead of typed input. Compared to conventional speech recognition for navigation systems, where the input is usually restricted to a fixed set of keywords and keyword phrases, complete spontaneous sentences are allowed as speech input. We will present the interaction of spe...