Between you and your Autonomous Car, there's Stewart

Stewart is a tactile interface designed for a fully autonomous car. Self-driving cars offer obvious benefits such as faster travel and enhanced safety. However, they also eliminate a sense of freedom, expression, and control while driving.

Stewart's objective is to accommodate a healthy relationship between man and machine, to be achieved by an intuitive and expressive form of interaction. Stewart provides you with constant updates about the car's behavior and its intentions. If you don't agree on the car's next course of action, you can manipulate Stewart to change this. Stewart will learn from you as you can learn from Stewart, hopefully resulting in a mutually trusting relationship. Interaction through Stewart will bring about a haptic discussion about what the car's next move will be. Who will win this discussion? Who knows best?

Stewart is a tactile interface designed to overcome human resistance to adopting the fully autonomous car. Stewart aims at accommodating a healthy relationship between man and machine by enabling intuitive and expressive forms of interaction with an otherwise autonomous car or vehicle. Stewart tries to make the driving experience personal again by enabling 'dialogue' or even discussions with an autonomous car. This dialogue can have multiple levels of intensity, from just changing direction to deliberately breaking the law. Changing direction or increasing/reducing speed should be easy to influence when the human driver chooses to do so. There will be barely any dialogue depending on how much effect this action has on parameters like arrival time and fuel consumption. However, if the human driver deliberately intends to break the law by ignoring a traffic light or hit a person, the car will (re)take control and communicate this through an intense haptic discussion. When a decision has to be made fast, the car will always make this decision for the driver. Any decision taken by the car is rational—and essentially better thought-through—which will increase safety during the journey.