Park4U Mate: Context-Aware Digital Assistant for Personalized Autonomous Parking
This addresses the need for personalized and trustworthy autonomous parking systems for vehicle users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing automated parking with added context-awareness and voice interaction.
The paper tackled the problem of autonomous vehicles needing to park in a situation-appropriate manner to meet user expectations, by developing a context-aware voice assistant that optimizes parking strategies, and results showed it was efficient and perceived as effective, though users preferred multi-modal interaction.
People park their vehicle depending on interior and exterior contexts. They do it naturally, even unconsciously. For instance, with a baby seat on the rear, the driver might leave more space on one side to be able to get the baby out easily; or when grocery shopping, s/he may position the vehicle to remain the trunk accessible. Autonomous vehicles are becoming technically effective at driving from A to B and parking in a proper spot, with a default way. However, in order to satisfy users' expectations and to become trustworthy, they will also need to park or make a temporary stop, appropriate to the given situation. In addition, users want to understand better the capabilities of their driving assistance features, such as automated parking systems. A voice-based interface can help with this and even ease the adoption of these features. Therefore, we developed a voice-based in-car assistant (Park4U Mate), that is aware of interior and exterior contexts (thanks to a variety of sensors), and that is able to park autonomously in a smart way (with a constraints minimization strategy). The solution was demonstrated to thirty-five users in test-drives and their feedback was collected on the system's decision-making capability as well as on the human-machine-interaction. The results show that: (1) the proposed optimization algorithm is efficient at deciding the best parking strategy; hence, autonomous vehicles can adopt it; (2) a voice-based digital assistant for autonomous parking is perceived as a clear and effective interaction method. However, the interaction speed remained the most important criterion for users. In addition, they clearly wish not to be limited on only voice-interaction, to use the automated parking function and rather appreciate a multi-modal interaction.