Affective interaction with a companion robot in an interactive driving assistant system

Driving assistant systems are becoming the attractive service tasks in the field of intelligent robotics. Humans meet a variety of situations while driving cars and robotic systems help humans to understand how surrounding situations change and how robot systems are aware of given situations. From the viewpoint of interaction performance, proper situation awareness by a robotic assistant in a car and the relevant determination of corresponding reactions are crucial prerequisites for long term interaction between a human driver and a car´s robotic system. In this paper, we focus on preserving human-robot interaction for driving situations, considering how many types of cognitive situation occur and how affective interaction can be designed for the robotic driving assistant. The appropriateness of the driving situation and of the robotic reactions are testified in our experiment system, including the development of a virtual driving environment and tablet-based robotic agent system.