Trust, control and risk in autonomous vehicles

The autonomous features in vehicles has grown steadily both in numbers and in terms of functionality over the past decade. With the development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) from Cruise Control, Lane change assist, etc., to the more advanced auto-pilot assistance systems, the creation of fully autonomous vehicles is not far away. Even with such technological improvements, the general public are still skeptical about autonomous vehicles. The goal of this project is to identify the factors that would significantly affect the trust in autonomous vehicles. This project aims to develop methods that can predict the perception of the autonomous vehicles by the people in its surroundings, mainly, pedestrians, cyclists and human drivers by modelling the trust interaction between them and their perceived risk in various situations. This model would be a generalized one, which could be applicable to any scenario and could be extended to the interactions between autonomous vehicles and their passengers or drivers.

This Project is a collaborative effort with Toyota Research Institute at the University of Michigan.