EAGER: Embodiment of Human Values Profiles in the Control of Autonomous Vehicles

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This Mind, Machine, and Motor Nexus (M3X) EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project advances a novel vision for trustworthy interaction between autonomous vehicles and their human drivers and passengers. Although autonomous vehicles are being developed to increase human safety, failures with such vehicles are inevitable, especially when timely handover of control to a human driver is infeasible due to human fatigue, distraction, or slow reaction times relative to the computational speed of the autonomous vehicle. This project seeks to design autonomous vehicle controllers that mimic the crash behaviors of responsible human drivers in a way that ensures "ethically graceful" failures - failure modes that are likely to meet human standards of ethical scrutiny. This project will promote the progress of science and advance the national health by developing trustworthy controllers for autonomous vehicles that mimic the real-time driving and crash behaviors of responsible human drivers. By doing so, the project will advance the state of the art in autonomous vehicle control while also developing a framework for vehicle controller design that promises to increase human trust in the autonomous vehicles of the future. The project also will develop resources to inspire involvement of underrepresented groups in STEM fields.The long-term goal of this work is to develop a new framework for autonomous vehicle controller design that will mimic the crash behaviors and decisions of responsible human drivers and thus exhibit "ethically graceful" failure modes. Two studies are researched. The first seeks to predict human driving behavior using surveys capable to identify psychological measures of "benevolent" and "power" Value Profiles in a large cohort of human subjects. Subjects will also engage in both virtual and physical simulations of crash scenarios. The goal of Study 1 is to characterize differences in crash behavior of people expressing benevolent and power Value Profiles. The second study researches a novel approach to translating the different Value Profiles into real-time controllers for the autonomous vehicles. The research l takes a novel approach that is quite different from existing deontological and consequentialist approaches to the design of ethical AI systems for AV control. By fitting the parameters of a low-level, real-time control model to data collected from drivers responding to crash scenarios in both virtual and physical simulations, the PI team will capture the moment-by-moment variations in human sensorimotor control that are more likely to dominate responses during crash scenarios than are high-level conscious decisions. If successful, this work may endow future autonomous vehicles with trustworthy controllers with failure modes that are likely to meet human standards of ethical scrutiny.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.