Paper On..

ARTIFICIAL PASSENGER
(A sleep prevention dialogue based car system)

Presented By:
M.N. Harika III B.Tech IT Rajeev Gandhi Memorial College Of Engg & Tech., Nandyal. E-mail ID: harika.mn@gmail.com Ph. 9052124277 V. Sujatha III B.Tech IT SanthiRam Engineering College, Nandyal. E-mail ID:sujatha.varada52@gamil.com Ph. 9177297996

ABSTRACT:

Telemetric services in cars (like navigation, cellular telephone, internet access) are becoming increasingly popular, but they may distract drivers from their main driving tasks and negatively affect driving safety. This paper addresses some aspects of voice user interface in cars, as a mechanism to increase driver safety. Voice control becomes more efficient in reducing driver distraction if drivers can speak commands in a natural manner rather than having to remember one or two variants supported by the system. In this paper we discuss some ways to increase naturalness. Computers in cars are usually not very powerful due to cost considerations. Low CPU resources are a limiting factor for embedded speech solutions. Another aspect of this paper is a recently introduced novel solution for using a speech interface to reduce driver drowsiness and prevent a driver from falling asleep. All driver activities in cars(driving, talking over telephone, controlling Telemetric devices, etc.) Contribute to driver workload. An Artificial Passenger (AP) is a device that would be used in a motor vehicle to make sure that the driver stays awake. IBM has developed a prototype that holds a conversation with a driver, telling jokes and asking questions intended to determine whether the driver can respond alertly enough. Assuming the IBM approach, an artificial passenger would use a microphone for the driver and a speech generator and the vehicle's audio speakers to converse with the driver. The conversation would be based on a personalized profile of the driver. A camera could be used to evaluate the driver's "facial state" and a voice analyzer to evaluate whether the driver was becoming drowsy. If a driver seemed to display too much fatigue, the artificial passenger might be programmed to open all the windows, sound a buzzer, increase background music volume, or even spray the driver with ice water.

Introduction:
According to a national survey in UK and USA, it is observed that the driver fatigue annually causes 100,000 crashes 1,500 fatalities 71,000 injuries which cause annual cost of $12.5billion. IBM received a patent for a sleep prevention system for use in automobiles. Artificial Passenger is the system, for which I.B.M. was awarded a patent this year, is designed to initiate conversations, tell corny jokes, play word games, change the radio station and otherwise entertain the driver. The software learns the driver's preferences and keeps track of typical speech cadences so that any slurring that may indicate fatigue can prompt, among other tactics, a suggestion that the driver stop at the nearest motel. "It's a simple idea: building an application that can pop up and have a conversation with the driver," said Dr. David Nahamoo, an engineer who leads a team of more than 60 researchers working on speech recognition and related technology at I.B.M. The company is in discussions with people in the car industry about developing the system in part as a segment of a broader platform for artificial intelligence devices. Artificial Passenger communicates with the driver through synthesized speech and car speakers. The driver's response is picked up by microphones that might be inserted in the seat belt, sun visor or rear- view mirror. Speech-recognition software decodes the driver's responses, possibly with the aid of a small on-board camera that tracks lip movement. The camera could also be used to detect signs of drowsiness like an eyelid closing, which could trigger emergency measures like automatically opening a window or even squirting a jet of water at the driver.

Voice control interface:

One of the ways to address driver safety concerns is to develop an efficient system that relies on voice instead of hands to control Telematics devices. It has been shown in various experiments that well designed voice control interfaces can reduce a drivers distraction compared with manual control situations. One of the ways to reduce a drivers cognitive workload is to allow the driver to speak naturally when interacting with a car system (e.g. when playing voice games, issuing commands via voice).

CIT speech systems can significantly improve a driver-vehicle relationship and contribute to driving safety. But the development of full fledged Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for CIT is a difficult problem that typically requires significant computer resources that are usually not available in local computer processors that car manufacturers provide for their cars. To address this, NLU components should be located on a server that is accessed by cars remotely or NLU should be downsized to run on local computer devices (that are typically based on embedded chips). The DM component is a rule based sub-system that can interact with the car and external systems (such as weather forecast services, e-mail systems, telephone directories, etc.) and a driver to reduce task complexity for the NLU system. The following are examples of conversations between a driver and DM that illustrate some of tasks that an advanced DM should be able to perform:

Ask questions (via a text to speech module) to resolve ambiguities: Driver: Please, plot a course to Yorktown DM: Within Massachusetts? Driver: No, in New York.

Fill in missing information and remove ambiguous references from context: Driver: What is the weather forecast for today? DM: Partly cloudy, 50% chance of rain. Driver: What about Ossining? DM: Partly sunny, 10% chance of rain.

Manage failure and provide contextual, failure- dependent help and actions: Driver: When will we get there? DM: Sorry, what did you say? DM: Sorry, what did you say?

Currently this issue is addressed by a convenient user interface that is provided by a research prototype of a CIT framework, that allows users to easily add new phrases and commands if they find that the system: Monitor driver and passenger actions in the cars internal and external environments across a network. Extract and record the Driver Safety Manager relevant data in databases; Generate and learn patterns from stored data. Learn from this data how Safety Driver Manager Components and driver behavior could be improved and adjusted to improve Driver Safety Manager Performance and improve driving safety.

Working:
A camera built into the dashboard also tracks your lip movements to improve the accuracy of the speech recognition. Heart of the system is a conversation planner. A microphone picks up answer and breaks it down into separate words with speech-recognition software. A voice analyzer then looks for signs of tiredness by checking to see if the answer matches your profile. Slow responses and a lack of intonation are signs of fatigue. The AP is not an inflatable automaton that sits in the passenger seat. It's an intelligent presence packed into the dashboard electronics.

Fig: Microphone arrangement

Fig: Mobile indicator

The heart of the system is a conversation planner that holds a profile of you, including details of your interests and profession. When activated, the AP uses the profile to cook up provocative questions such as, "Who was the first person you dated?" via a speech generator and the in-car speakers. When the driver is not able to answer his calls at that moment the mobile indicator automatically accept or decline calls according to drivers wish. The above figure indicates how the mobile can be placed.

Workload Manager:
In this section we provide a brief analysis of the design of the workload management that is a key component of driver Safety Manager. An object of the workload manager is to determine a moment-to-moment analysis of the user's cognitive workload. It accomplishes this by collecting data about user conditions, monitoring local and remote events, and prioritizing message delivery. There is rapid growth in the use of sensory technology in cars. These sensors allow for the monitoring of driver actions (e.g. application of brakes changing lanes), provide information about local events (e.g. heavy rain), and provide information about driver characteristics (e.g. speaking speed, eyelid status). There is also growing amount of distracting information that may be presented to the driver (e.g. phone rings, radio, music, e-mail etc.) and actions that a driver can perform in cars via voice control. The relationship between a driver and a car should be consistent with the information from sensors. The workload manager should be designed in such a way that it can integrate sensor information and rules on when and if distracting information is delivered. This can be designed as a workload representational surface. One axis of the surface would represent stress on the vehicle and another, orthogonally distinct axis, would represent stress on the driver.

Fig: Condition sensors device

Applications:
Artificial Passenger is broadly used to prevent accident. Artificial Passenger device is also used for entertainment such as asking questions. Artificial Passenger component establishes interface with other drivers very easily. Open and close the window of a car automatically and also answer a call for you. In any problem it alerts the vehicles near by, so the driver there can become alert. Opens and closes the doors and windows of the car automatically.

Driver drowsiness prevention Artificial Passenger:

Fatigue causes more than 240,000 vehicular accidents every year. Currently, drivers who are alone in a vehicle have access only to media such as music and radio news which they listen to passively. Often these do not provide sufficient stimulation to assure wakefulness. Ideally, drivers should be presented with external stimuli that are interactive to improve their alertness. Driving, however, occupies the drivers eyes and hands, thereby limiting most current interactive options. Among the efforts presented in this general direction, the invention suggests fighting drowsiness by detecting drowsiness via speech biometrics and, if needed, by increasing arousal via speech interactivity. The Artificial Passenger interaction is founded on the concept of psychological arousal. Most well known emotion researchers agree that arousal (high, low) and valence (positive, negative) are the two fundamental dimensions of emotion. Arousal reflects the level of stimulation of the person as measured by physiological aspects such as heart rate, cortical activation, and respiration. For someone to be sleepy or fall asleep, they have to have a very low level of arousal

Future Application:
Will provide us with a shortest-time routing road conditions changing because of weather and traffic, information of about the cars on the route, destination requirement (as flight has been delayed).

Conclusion:
In the paper we suggested that such important issues related to a driver safety, such as controlling Telemetric devices and drowsiness can be addressed by a special speech interface. This interface requires interactions with workload, dialog, event, privacy, situation and other modules. We showed that basic speech interactions can be done in a low-resource embedded processor and this allows a development of a useful local component of Safety Driver Manager. The reduction of conventional speech processes to low resources processing was done by reducing a signal processing and decoding load in such a way that it did not significantly affect decoding accuracy and by the development of quasi-NLU principles. Providing new services in a car environment is important to make the driver comfortable and it can be a significant source of revenues for Telematics. We expect that novel ideas in this paper regarding the use of speech and distributive user interfaces in Telematics will have a significant impact on driver safety and they will be the subject of intensive research and development in forthcoming years at IBM and other laboratories.

References:
www.ieee.org www.esnips.com www.electronics4u.com www.wikipedia.com