A novel approach to improve the social acceptance of autonomous driving vehicles by recognizing the emotions of passengers

For some years now, the idea of a fully autonomous driving car has been monopolizing the attention of the entire automotive sector. The main motivation behind all this interest is that autonomous driving cars could potentially improve road safety simply by subtracting human error, which causes thousands of road fatalities worldwide every year. One of the biggest challenges, for which researchers are working hard to give answers, concerns the search of solutions to improve the people’s response to this vehicles once they are put on the road: an incorrect answer can lead to their unsuccess, with a great monetary loss for all the companies that have invested in these technologies. Recently, we worked on a project that went in this direction and which regarded the possibility to change the driving style of the autonomous driving cars based on the passengers’ facial expressions. This is particularly useful in the event that they experience fear: the car may react to these feelings by adopting a careful driving style and stopping if these feelings do not improve within a certain period. In this paper, we want to discuss about the improvements we have made to this project.