On Modeling the Effects of Auditory Annoyance on Driving Style and Passenger Comfort

Despite the impressive progress being made in autonomous vehicles, human drivers will remain ubiquitous in the imminent years. Therefore, intelligent hybrid vehicular systems must be aware of the interactions between humans and the environment (e.g., sound, vibration, speed, etc.). In this paper, we evaluate the effect of acoustic annoyance on drivers in a real-world driving study. We found significant differences in driving styles elicited by annoying acoustics and present an online classifier that uses onboard inertial measurement unit measurements to distinguish whether a driver is annoyed with 77% accuracy. Moreover, we directly measured the forces applied on the passenger with a pressure mat lined on the car seat, and empirically confirm that our proposed passenger dynamics model is reasonable. However, due to our acoustically induced driving styles not being polarizing enough, we were unable to show that passengers’ self-reported ride comfort changed with acoustic annoyance.

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