Advanced Vehicle Technology Consortium (AVT)

The Advanced Vehicle Study (AVT) Consortium was launched in 2015 to study how drivers use new technologies in their cars, including "vehicle automation, driver assistance technology, and the range of in-vehicle and portable technologies for connectivity and infotainment." Having collected data on participants now for more than six months, the AVT Consortium is still looking for drivers of Tesla model S and X vehicles to join the study -- and will soon be recruiting owners of 2017 Volvo XC90s and S90s as well. 

The Consortium was launched in collaboration with Touchstone Evaluations, Inc. and Agero, a leader in vehicle and driver safety services. This consortium aims to develop a new and deeper understanding of how drivers leverage vehicle automation, driver assistance technologies, and the range of in-vehicle and portable technologies for connectivity and infotainment. The AVT Consortium’s membership now includes Delphi, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Jaguar Land Rover, Autoliv, and Toyota.

The AVT Consortium, which began to collect data in the Boston area this past January, is currently recruiting drivers of Tesla models S and X vehicles who are willing to have data recording technology installed in their own vehicles. This recruitment effort was recently captured in a Reddit post and has since been featured in a set of articles including Yahoo News, Tech Times and others. Present plans call for expanding the scope of the program to recruit owners of 2017 Volvo XC90s and S90s later this summer and it is expected that other makes and models of semiautonomous cars will be considered as they become available. The research effort also involves loaning MIT purchased vehicles to participants to study technology adoption, survey efforts assessing consumer preferences for technologies, and a consideration of today’s automotive dealer delivery experience. Future work may broaden the effort beyond Boston to other areas of the United States and indeed the globe.

In the study, technicians outfit participants’ cars with a variety of sensors, including three small cameras, which record the forward-facing roadway, vehicle’s instrument cluster, and driver’s face, hands and body positioning, respectively. These devices are unobtrusive and tend to blend into the cockpit environment for most drivers, becoming a part of the ‘vehicle’s background’ after a few hours of driving – allowing drivers to behave as they naturally would. Using advanced computer-vision software, researchers are then able to quantify drivers’ actions, such as how they respond to various driving situations, as well as when they eat, operate phones, have conversations, and perform other actions behind the wheel. Great care is taken to protect personally identifying information in this analysis process, and to ensure that only the meaningful patterns are extracted from the data (while protecting individual identities).

Of special interest are the fleeting, yet critical, moments when control transfers from driver to car and back again. By assessing the driver’s gaze, hand placement, body posture and position, drowsiness, emotional state, and more; and then combining those data with vehicle telemetry and secure geographical location information; researchers can assemble a more complete picture of how people and semiautonomous vehicles work together—or don’t.

The work does not stop there. The AVT Consortium is interested in generating a deeper understanding of how drivers respond to alarms (lane keeping, forward collision, proximity detectors, etc.), leverage technologies such as semi-automated parking assistance, assisted cruise control, vehicle infotainment and communication systems, smartphones and more. An important aspect of the work focuses on utilizing a fleet of MIT owned vehicles (starting with 2016 Land Rover Evoques & 2017 Volvo S90s) to assess how education can play a role in successful adoption of new vehicle systems, and how the automotive ecosystem (manufacturers, suppliers, dealers, insurance providers, etc.) work together to support drivers’ acquisition of the knowledge needed to maximize the potential safety benefits offered by many new vehicle systems.