Human-Centered Autonomous Vehicle Systems: Principles of Effective Shared Autonomy

TL;DR

This paper discusses the complex challenge of designing autonomous vehicles that effectively and safely interact with humans by proposing principles that embrace human complexity and illustrate their application through a case study.

Contribution

It introduces a set of principles for human-centered autonomous vehicle design and demonstrates their implementation via a detailed case study.

Findings

Principles improve vehicle-human interaction safety

Design approach enhances user experience and trust

Case study validates practical application of principles

Abstract

Building effective, enjoyable, and safe autonomous vehicles is a lot harder than has historically been considered. The reason is that, simply put, an autonomous vehicle must interact with human beings. This interaction is not a robotics problem nor a machine learning problem nor a psychology problem nor an economics problem nor a policy problem. It is all of these problems put into one. It challenges our assumptions about the limitations of human beings at their worst and the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems at their best. This work proposes a set of principles for designing and building autonomous vehicles in a human-centered way that does not run away from the complexity of human nature but instead embraces it. We describe our development of the Human-Centered Autonomous Vehicle (HCAV) as an illustrative case study of implementing these principles in practice.