What is ADAS Tutor?

More vehicles nowadays are equipped with Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS). Those systems are designed to support drivers in their driving tasks. A very well-known ADAS is the (Adaptive) Cruise Control. Among other driving assistance systems are Lane Keeping Assist, Blind Spot Monitoring and Autonomous Emergency Braking.

However, our research has highlighted that many drivers do not understand well the capabilities and limits of the ADAS, and either disable or underuse those thus reducing their intended safety goal.

To reconnect the drivers with the ADAS, we have developed ADAS Tutor, a feature that can teach drivers the ADAS functionalities, their limitations and capabilities, to improve safety, comfort, and trust when driving. Aisin ADAS Tutor is based on a state-of-the-art voice assistant, using natural language understanding. It means users can interact with the ADAS Tutor using their own sentence structure. There is no need to learn specific sentences and terminology.

Today, Aisin ADAS Tutor is mainly based on user-initiated requests, meaning the voice assistant answers questions asked by the driver. In our roadmap, we are also planning to address system-initiated tutoring. This implies that the tutoring system will sense when to teach the driver and what are driver’s knowledge gaps

Origin

The very start of this feature goes back to the VIADUCT project, started on 1st of November 2018. The project ended on the 30th of April 2022 and aimed at applying UX research methodologies to the problematic of semi-autonomous driving, specifically switching between manual and autonomous modes.

The VIADUCT project explored the improvement of the user experience in semi-autonomous vehicles, to improve safety, comfort, and trust. As there are more and more technologies in vehicles, it is important to improve and redesign the interactions between the driver and the vehicle.

During this project, we interviewed more than 120 drivers and we discovered the following:

• driving schools don't teach ADAS to new drivers

• most people do not read their car’s user's manual, so they don't know the capabilities and limitations of their car’s ADAS features

• for some vehicles that are recent and connected, over-the-air software upgrades can bring new features or improvements in ADAS, so it is important to keep the “user’s manual” up to date

Based on the user-centred design, we designed a prototype, tested it with users on our driving simulator, and iterated several times to come up with the first version. This first version is integrated into our demo car, and we are ready to show it at any time.

Location

The main location of the project is the European headquarters of Aisin at Braine-l’Alleud, in the south of Brussels in Belgium.

Stakeholders

If you are an OEM, if you want your customers to build the right mental model of the ADAS systems, and if you are interested in a collaboration to design your own ADAS Tutor, you can contact our expert just below.