A Proposal for a Driving Status Notification Agent to Gain Passengers' Trust in the Period of Fully Automated Vehicle Introduction

Abstract

In this study, we propose a driving status notification agent that notifies the passenger (user) of the driving situation known to the automated driving system by utterances in highly automated vehicles of Level 4 or higher. After obtaining the driving situation from various sensors of the vehicle, the automatic driving system examines the surrounding situation and determines the driving operation. The proposed agent system notifies the passenger of the driving situation by voice utterances and gestures of the agent. The agent system is considered to be useful for gaining the trust of users who have concerns about highly automated driving. In this paper, we report the results of impression evaluation of the proposed agent by video-based survey.