University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI)

September, 2017 - May, 2018

What is UMTRI, you ask? From the UMTRI website: “With a multimillion-dollar research program, broad faculty expertise, and multiple collaborators, UMTRI is committed to interdisciplinary research that will ultimately increase driving safety and further transportation systems knowledge.”

You can read more about UMTRI here.

User Trust Study

This is the primary project that I worked on at UMTRI, in cooperation with DENSO. Using a 2017 Subaru Legacy, our goal was to evaluate how much drivers trust the onboard safety systems. We specifically looked at how drivers interact with the lane keep assist (LKA) system, as well as the lane departure warning (LDW) system. The overall goal of this study was to figure out a quantifiable way to evaluate a user's trust towards automated driving systems.

I personally helped with both data coding and the study methodology, including setting up the car for each driver, as well as prepping and testing each participant in the vehicle.