AI Companion - Trust in Piloted Driving

Master thesis (2017)

Authors

P. Mösinger Industrial Design Engineering

Contributors

J.E. Oberdorf (mentor)
W.F. Kets (mentor)
Faculty
Industrial Design Engineering, Industrial Design Engineering
Copyright: © 2017 Philipp Mösinger
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Published Date

23-11-2017

Language

English

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Faculty

Industrial Design Engineering

Abstract

Advances in technology during the last decade have made piloted vehicles a reality. With an increasing level of vehicle automation, the role of the driver changes from controlling and observing the driving environment into becoming a passenger. However, with the introduction of piloted driving, the user has to trust his life to a machine. Therefore, one of the most important factors in the human-car relationship will be trust that the occupant places in the piloted vehicle (Waytz, Heafner, & Epley, 2014). In fact, the feeling of trust will have a major impact on the acceptance of piloted driving and is an important factor in the judgment of autonomous systems (Garcia, Kreutzer, Badillo-Urquiola, & Mouloua, 2015). However, recent scientific surveys indicated that people are interested in the new technology, but hesitate to trust piloted driving vehicles (Schmidt, 2016, Schoettle & Sivak, 2014, Kyriakidis, Happee, & Winter, 2015).

In order to define the future domain and context for this thesis, the target year is based on different expert forecasts on the development of autonomous driving. According to literature, it can be concluded that due to developments in technology, fully autonomous driving will be market-ready between 2025-2030 (ERTRAC, 2015; Rupp & King, 2010). Due to the fact that the next generation vehicles for 2020-2023 are currently under development, the selected target year for this thesis is 2030 in order to create a visionary input for the subsequent fully autonomous vehicle generation of Audi.

The theoretical analysis about fully piloted driving and the related problem of trust in combination with the developed future context scenario of 2030, which will be discussed later in this thesis, led to the following mission statement:

“Design of an AI Companion that evokes the feeling of trust by creating a relationship that is characterised by authenticity and control”

Based on the mission statement, the interaction analogy of “using a compass for guidance in unknown territory” and the derived product qualities of “vivid”, “reassuring”, “familiar” and “magical”, the AI Companion was developed.

The AI Companion is an innovative haptic interface concept for a fully piloted vehicle without a steering wheel and pedals with the objective to build trust between the vehicle and the occupants. By simply laying on hands, the AI Companion generates a magical, haptic movement that allows the user to feel the upcoming driving manoeuvres of the piloted vehicle. By actively moving the AI Companion the user has the ability to communicate with the vehicle and therefore shapes its driving dynamics. Through the interaction with the user, the AI Companion creates an individual piloted driving profile based on the needs of each occupant.

In order to make the functions perceptible and to test if the AI Companion concept fulfils the desired product qualities in order to evoke the feeling of trust, a functional design prototype was build. To evaluate the concept, a user test with 47 participants was carried out. The user test revealed that the developed prototype satisfies the desired product qualities to a large extent. That in turn forms the basis for a trustful relationship between the user and the product. Therefore, it can be stated that the AI Companion has a positive influence on the feeling of trust in the context of a fully piloted vehicle.