A Framework to Study Autonomous Driving User Acceptance in the Wild

The I.DRIVE Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano, aims at developing inter-disciplinary proficiency required for the analysis and modeling of behavioral aspects due to the interaction between driver, vehicle, infrastructure, and environment. The present research outlines the development of a software and hardware platform that allows studying, in a real car, the interaction between driver, car, road infrastructure, and environment. In particular, we focus on driver stress and we want to understand which are the driving factors that impact driver stress in order to ease future wide acceptance of car automation. To validate our framework, six drivers performed a manual drive, an autonomous drive, and a manual drive as passengers in a controlled scenario. Results show that longitudinal jerk, angular velocity on x-axes, and lateral acceleration have a high correlation with two stress indexes, the skin conductance's phasic component, and the respiration rate.