MAVERIC: A Data-Driven Approach to Personalized Autonomous Driving
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Personalization of autonomous vehicles (AV) may significantly increase trust, use, and acceptance. In particular, we hypothesize that the similarity of an AV's driving style compared to the end-user's driving style will have a major impact on end-user's willingness to use the AV. To investigate the impact of driving style on user acceptance, we 1) develop a data-driven approach to personalize driving style and 2) demonstrate that personalization significantly impacts attitudes towards AVs. Our approach learns a high-level model that tunes low-level controllers to ensure safe and personalized control of the AV. The key to our approach is learning an informative, personalized embedding that represents a user's driving style. Our framework is capable of calibrating the level of aggression so as to optimize driving style based upon driver preference. Across two human subject studies (n = 54), we first demonstrate our approach mimics the driving styles of end-users and can tune attributes of style (e.g., aggressiveness). Second, we investigate the factors (e.g., trust, personality etc.) that impact homophily, i.e. an individual's preference for a driving style similar to their own. We find that our approach generates driving styles consistent with end-user styles (p<.001) and participants rate our approach as more similar to their level of aggressiveness (p=.002). We find that personality (p<.001), perceived similarity (p<.001), and high-velocity driving style (p=.0031) significantly modulate the effect of homophily.
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