WVII interviews Corey, student at VEMI Lab about autonomous vehicle, human collaboration research
WVII (Channel 7) interviewed Richard Corey, director of operations at the University of Maine’s Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction Laboratory (VEMI Lab), and Paul Fink, a graduate research assistant at the lab, about an upcoming research project focused on interactions between autonomous vehicles and their human passengers. “We’re looking at what they call level five autonomy. And that is fully self-driving, no steering wheels, get in the car, sit down, tell it where you’re going and there you go,” said Corey. The project has been awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to study what Corey calls “human-vehicle collaboration,” or how information is communicated between the human passenger and the artificial intelligent driver, WVII reported. “Over 70 percent of people have reported such grave distrust in this technology that they’re scared to even get in the vehicle. So we think looking at all these interactions and communications with the vehicle and exposing this decision space are really the first steps towards addressing the trust problem in autonomous vehicles,” said Fink. “I think it’s incredibly important to have students at the forefront of this kind of development, especially when we’re not thinking about it strictly in ways that are purely about the technical development because that way we can bring students from all different backgrounds to work on this.” The current step in the project is creating a virtual reality simulator to test what a fully autonomous car would be like, with the overall research goal of proving to the public that self-driving cars are trustworthy, WVII reported. The Maine Edge published a UMaine news release on the project.