AIDA

AIDA (Affective Intelligent Driving Agent), is 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. AIDA provides smart navigation, hands-free access to messages and meetings, and a comforting presence to drivers.

AIDA’s intelligence runs on an Android smartphone, and can leverage other apps as well as knowledge about the driver via contacts, calendar, etc. For instance, AIDA can send and read text messages, receive weather and traffic updates, and schedule and provide reminders for appointments. The screen of the phone becomes AIDA’s face. Because AIDA lives on your phone,she can be with you both in the car as a robot as well as outside the car as a virtual assistant.

We conducted a driving simulation experiment 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 alone or AIDA as a static agent. In a follow-on set of experiments, we also compared the effect of AIDA’s presence to the effect of having a person in the passenger seat. Participants drove more safely with AIDA in the car, compared to another human.