If a team of MIT researchers is successful, you’ll never drive alone again. The scientists are developing a robotic personal driving assistant that will get to know you in a variety of ways, down to reading your mood.

The Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) pulls together inputs from a variety of sources, including GPS, a driver’s historical driving patterns, weather, local stores and events, and the driver’s facial expression, then serves up directions and advice through a humanoid dashboard-mounted robot. By observing a driver’s habits, AIDA can determine the driver’s home and work locations. It can also give tips for better and more energy-efficient driving.

 “In developing AIDA, we asked ourselves how we could design a system that would offer the same kind of guidance as an informed and friendly companion,” said Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT. Indeed, AIDA can blink and smile as well as detect who is driving and what the driver’s outlook or attitude might be.   

 “The AIDA system is composed of two main components, a smart navigation system and a social robot,” said Giusy Di Lorenzo, postdoctoral fellow at MIT. The intelligent navigation system takes into account a driver’s behavior, destination, trajectory and the locality in which the driver is driving, he explained. GPS location is an important source of information, as is seasonal information, environmental conditions, store locations, events and information from car sensors. The robot uses all of these information inputs to learn about a driver's habits, routes, goals and relationship with the local region, Di Lorenzo said.

Over time, AIDA will develop a relationship with the driver in which both parties learn from each other. A prototype for possible commercial production is due in 2011.

The project is a collaboration between the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab.