Effect of Difference in Form of Driving Support Agent to Driver’s Acceptability<br/>—Driver Agent for Encouraging Safe Driving Behavior (2)

Abstract

In recent years, the number of traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers has increased in Japan. However, a car is an important mode of transportation for the elderly. Therefore, to ensure safe driving, a system that can assist elderly drivers is required. In this study, we propose a driver-agent system that provides support to elderly drivers during and after driving and encourages them to improve their driving. This paper describes the prototype system based on the analysis of the teaching records of a human instructor, and the subjective evaluation of driving support to elderly and non-elderly driver from three different agent forms, a voice, visual, and robot. The result revealed that the robot form is more noticeable, familiar, and acceptable to the elderly and non-elderly than other forms.

Influence of Social Distance Expressed by Driving Support Agent’s Utterance on Psychological Acceptability

“…Specifically, in this experiment, it is assumed that experimental participants drive the experimental course used in Tanaka et al (2018a) . Figure 2 shows the simulated driving course used by Tanaka et al (2018a) . This course is a reproduction of the road around Nagoya University in Japan.…”

“…”). However, direct utterances have been reported to be less acceptable in driving support ( Fujikake et al, 2017 ; Tanaka et al, 2018a ) and significantly less acceptable than PPS/NPS ( Salem et al, 2013 ; Torrey et al, 2013 ; Srinivasan and Takayama, 2016 ; Deshmukh et al, 2018 ; Lee et al, 2019 ). Previous studies have shown that direct speech is less receptive than PPS/NPS.…”

“…Thus, we can say that the DSA is a support aimed at a user who performs his driving operation himself, which is considerably different from an automatically driven car. According to a previous study, small robots that speak a synthesized speech are more acceptable (i.e., not bothersome, not hinder for driving) than that of virtual characters and synthesized speech-only agent ( Tanaka et al, 2018a ). This information was obtained via a survey questionnaire and gaze behavior analysis.…”

“…In recent years, with the goal of enabling a new kind of relationship between humans and cars, there is an increasing amount of research on D riving S upport A gent (DSA) (e.g., robot/virtual character) loaded in a car, which acts like a user’s partner ( Tanaka et al, 2018a , b ; Karatas et al, 2019 ; Lee et al, 2019 ; Miyamoto et al, 2019 ). These agents have intelligent utterance functions and support users by voice utterances, hand gestures, and facial gestures.…”

“…In their study, the agent does not have a physical form. It has been reported that people are significantly more receptive of small robots than agents without physicality ( Tanaka et al, 2018a ). On the other hand, Miyamoto et al (2019) conducted an utterance design of a small robot as the DSA based on the politeness strategy; however, their participants were limited to students.…”