Wednesday, April 3rd. 2019.
The flexCAR project members came together to present their work and to discuss new ideas on how autonomous driving will happen in the future. How will we communicate with the car? What interactions are possible? How much control will we have and how much do we need? What are user expectations and how can they be satisfied? A lot of questions and many good ideas how to solve them. But this is just the beginning. The next step will be to build real prototypes and test them with users.
Our HdM team showed off the MoodMorph prototype that scans your face when booking an autonomous shuttle and depending on your mood it automatically morphs the interior of the vehicle in order to make it as comfortable or practically useful for you as possible. We used on device Machine-Learning for the mood detection and Flutter to develop the app that then controls two car seats automatically based on your user profile. So you do not have to do anything than book, sit and enjoy! Another project that started this semester is “Exit Games”. The question that we are trying to answer here is: What are the best ways to exit an autonomous shuttle in different situations? Not only the case of an unforseen event or emergency is interesting for us, but also the case where we have luggage blocking the exit, or elderly people that need help to get out, but have difficulties doing so and so on. As there is no driver, how can you take control of the situation or who will help you exiting the vehicle, if you can’t? There are many situations that can occur, but often they do not come to your mind, when you design the product. Thus it is important to test as early as possible.
The Expo Day was a very interesting and impressive event with a lot of new insights and contacts. Thanks very much again to the organisational team from Daimler (thanks Max and Frieder!). Also many thanks to the HdM team: Tobias Schneider, Sebastian Koch, Carina Kreidler, Christoph Diefenthal and the Exit Games ladies.