Human-Centric Intelligent Driving: Collaborating with the Driver to Improve Safety

Despite the benefits of autonomous vehicles, their many challenges have made their wide scale deployment and adoption slower than hoped for. In order to help spread the potential benefits of autonomy sooner, as well as to cater to people who will continue to prefer to drive themselves while improving safety, there is a need for intelligent interaction and collaboration between increasingly automated vehicles and humans. At Toyota Research Institute, we call this Human-Centric Intelligent Driving (HCID). HCID has many technical challenges, some of which are shared with fully autonomous driving. Due to the collaborative nature between humans and machines in HCID, some of these challenges are particularly important and potentially different from fully autonomous driving. This chapter focuses on Toyota Research Institute’s (TRI) approach to addressing some of these core challenges.