Humans can be deeply influenced by affective behaviors during social interaction. Specifically, emotional cues from others can be a powerful way to persuade people to modify their behaviors. With this motivation in mind, we explore how a social robot called AIDA (Affective Intelligent Driving Agent) can better persuade drivers to adhere to road safety guidelines as compared to existing technologies, and AIDA's persuasiveness as compared to a human passenger. An Android smartphone, which mounts in the robot's head, serves as AIDA's main computational unit. Because the smartphone contains personal information about the driver (e.g. contacts, calendar and music preferences), leveraging this device can create a more deeply personalized experience. We conducted a user study in which participants completed tasks in a driving simulator with the help of: 1) a smartphone alone, 2) AIDA as a static-mounted agent, 3) AIDA as an expressive robot, or 4) a smartphone plus a human passenger. AIDA was able to promote safe driving behaviors and reduce cognitive load better than a smartphone alone. Overall, the AIDA robot paralleled in performance as compared to the human passenger. The AIDA robot also facilitated more sociability with the driver than the smartphone or static agent. Further, AIDA's proactive launching of the driver's favorite music better promoted overall enjoyment.

This paper presents AIDA (Affective Intelligent Driving Agent), a social robot that acts as a friendly, in-car companion. AIDA is designed to use the driver's mobile device as its face. The phone displays facial expressions and is the main computational unit to manage information presented to the driver. We conducted an experiment in which participants were placed in a mock in-car environment and completed driving tasks while stress-inducing phone and vehicle notifications occurred throughout the interaction. Users performed the task with the help of: 1) a smartphone, 2) the AIDA persona with the phone mounted on a static dock, or 3) the AIDA persona attached to a robot. Results revealed that AIDA users felt less stressed throughout the interaction, performed vehicle safety precautions more often, and felt more companionship with AIDA as compared to smartphone users. Further, participants developed a deeper bond with AIDA as a social robot compared to AIDA as a static, expressive agent.

Abstract. 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.

This work outlines the development of a reasoning architecture that uses physics-, social-, and agent capability-based knowledge to generate manipulation strategies for a dexterous robot. The architecture learns object affordances through human observations, imposed constraints, and hardcoded physics logic. Human observations are also used to develop a unique manipulation repertoire suitable for the robot. Bayesian Networks are then used to probabilistically determine manipulation strategies for the robot to execute. The robot leverages this knowledge during experimental trials where manipulation strategies suggested by the reasoning architecture are shown to perform well during new manipulation tasks.

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