MAVERIC: A Data-Driven Approach to Personalized Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Personalization of autonomous vehicles (AVs) may significantly increase acceptance. In particular, we hypothesize that the similarity of an AV's driving style compared to a user's driving style, the level of aggressiveness of the driving style, and other subjective factors (e.g., personality) will have a major impact on user's willingness to use the AV. In this work, we 1) develop a data-driven approach to personalize driving style and calibrate the level of aggressiveness and 2) investigate the subjective factors that impact user preference. Across two human subject studies (n = 54), we demonstrate that our approach can mimic the driving styles and tune the level of aggressiveness. Second, we leverage our framework to investigate the factors that impact homophily. We demonstrate that our approach generates driving styles objectively ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p &lt; .001$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) and subjectively ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p = .002$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) consistent with end-user styles ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p &lt; .001$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) and can effectively isolate and modulate a dimension of style (i.e., aggressiveness) ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p &lt; .001$</tex-math></inline-formula> ). Furthermore, we find that personality ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p &lt; .001$</tex-math></inline-formula> ), perceived similarity ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p &lt; .001$</tex-math></inline-formula> ), and high-velocity driving style ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p = .0031$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) significantly modulate the effect of homophily.