Intelligent In-Vehicle Interaction Technologies

With rapid advances in the field of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the ways in which human-vehicle interaction (HVI) will take place inside the vehicle have attracted major interest and, as a result, intelligent interiors are being explored to improve the user experience, acceptance, and trust. This is also fueled by parallel research in areas such as perception and control of robots, safe human-robot interaction, wearable systems, and the underpinning flexible/printed electronics technologies. Some of these are being routed to AVs. Growing number of network of sensors are being integrated into the vehicles for multimodal interaction to draw correct inferences of the communicative cues from the user and to vary the interaction dynamics depending on the cognitive state of the user and contextual driving scenario. In response to this growing trend, this timely article presents a comprehensive review of the technologies that are being used or developed to perceive user's intentions for natural and intuitive in-vehicle interaction. The challenges that are needed to be overcome to attain truly interactive AVs and their potential solutions are discussed along with various new avenues for future research.