Kumar Akash

Kumar Akash
  • Doctor of Philosophy
  • Scientist at Honda Research Institute USA, Inc.

About

66
Publications
10,159
Reads
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832
Citations
Current institution
Honda Research Institute USA, Inc.
Current position
  • Scientist
Additional affiliations
August 2020 - present
Honda Research Institute USA, Inc.
Position
  • Researcher
August 2015 - July 2020
Purdue University West Lafayette
Position
  • Research Assistant
Description
  • A Closed-Loop Framework for Increasing Trust in Human-Machine Interactions: This research aims to improve human-machine collaboration by designing intelligent machines with the ability to respond to changes in human trust in real-time.
August 2015 - December 2015
Purdue University West Lafayette
Position
  • Graduate Teaching Assistant
Description
  • Graduate teaching assistant for the laboratory with an enrollment of 22 undergraduate students.
Education
August 2015 - August 2020
Purdue University West Lafayette
Field of study
  • Mechanical Engineering
August 2015 - May 2018
Purdue University West Lafayette
Field of study
  • Mechanical Engineering
July 2011 - May 2015
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Field of study
  • Mechanical Engineering

Publications

Publications (66)
Preprint
Full-text available
For future human-autonomous vehicle (AV) interactions to be effective and smooth, human-aware systems that analyze and align human needs with automation decisions are essential. Achieving this requires systems that account for human cognitive states. We present a novel computational model in the form of a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that infers...
Article
Full-text available
Evaluating drivers’ situation awareness (SA) is important in the implementation of alert prioritization. This study investigates the relationship between driving performance measures (speed, acceleration and brake usage, steering wheel and lane deviation), pedestrian interaction (location, direction and motion), and driver SA. To achieve this, a c...
Article
Full-text available
As societies transition to hybrid mobility systems, interactions between automated vehicles (AVs) and human users in public spaces become more complex, highlighting the critical role of prosocial behaviors. These behaviors are essential for the seamless operation of interdependent transportation networks, helping to address integration challenges o...
Preprint
Full-text available
Service robots are increasingly deployed in public spaces, performing functional tasks such as making deliveries. To better integrate them into our social environment and enhance their adoption, we consider integrating social identities within delivery robots along with their functional identity. We conducted a virtual reality-based pilot study to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Micromobility devices, such as e-scooters and delivery robots, hold promise for eco-friendly and cost-effective alternatives for future urban transportation. However, their lack of societal acceptance remains a challenge. Therefore, we must consider ways to promote prosocial behavior in micromobility interactions. We investigate how post-ride feedb...
Preprint
Full-text available
Micromobility devices, such as e-scooters and delivery robots, hold promise for eco-friendly and cost-effective alternatives for future urban transportation. However, their lack of societal acceptance remains a challenge. Therefore, we must consider ways to promote prosocial behavior in micromobility interactions. We investigate how post-ride feedb...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Cooperative automated vehicles (AVs) bring the potential for better safety, efficiency, and energy-savings on the individual and system level. Yet, these benefits can only be achieved if people cooperate. In this study, we explored the effects of cooperative and reciprocal AVs on people's well-being, trust, and cooperation. We conducted a mixed-des...
Article
Rapid advances in shared mobility and vehicle automation have led to a monumental shift of interest toward developing automated systems. However, automation development has wider implications for how end users would trust these novel automation systems. This research explored how the experience with prior automation systems and exposure to vehicles...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent advances in Automated vehicle (AV) technology and micromobility devices promise a transformational change in the future of mobility usage. These advances also pose challenges concerning human-AV interactions. To ensure the smooth adoption of these new mobilities, it is essential to assess how past experiences and perceptions of social intera...
Article
Objective: This study aimed to investigate the impact of automated vehicle (AV) interaction mode on drivers' trust and preferred driving styles in response to pedestrian- and traffic-related road events. Background: The rising popularity of AVs highlights the need for a deeper understanding of the factors that influence trust in AV. Trust is a c...
Article
Full-text available
While trust in different types of automated vehicles has been a major focus for researchers and vehicle manufacturers, few studies have explored how people trust automated vehicles that are not cars, nor how their trust may transfer across different mobilities enabled with automation. To address this objective, a dual mobility study was designed to...
Preprint
Full-text available
The ever-increasing adoption of shared transportation modalities across the United States has the potential to fundamentally change the preferences and usage of different mobilities. It also raises several challenges with respect to the design and development of automated mobilities that can enable a large population to take advantage of this emerg...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The ever-increasing adoption of shared transportation modalities across the United States has the potential to fundamentally change the preferences and usage of different mobilities. It also raises several challenges with respect to the design and development of automated mobilities that can enable a large population to take advantage of this emerg...
Article
In automated driving, it is important to maintain drivers’ situational awareness (SA) in order to help them avoid unnecessary interventions and negotiate challenging scenarios where human takeovers are needed. Our study developed computational models to predict a driver’s SA of a target object. Using the SEEV (Salience, Effort, Expectancy, and Valu...
Article
Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) will be introduced in greater numbers over the coming decade. Due to rapid advances in shared mobility and the slower development of fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), SAVs will likely be deployed before privately-owned AVs. Moreover, existing shared mobility services are transitioning their vehicle fleets toward tho...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The objective of this study is to assess drivers’ ability to detect objects and the trajectory of these objects in scenarios with different environmental complexity levels. This is examined in the context of situation awareness (SA), defined as theperception, comprehension and projection of the environmental properties andpositions. The Situation A...
Preprint
Full-text available
A key factor to optimal acceptance and comfort of automated vehicle features is the driving style. Mismatches between the automated and the driver preferred driving styles can make users take over more frequently or even disable the automation features. This work proposes identification of user driving style preference with multimodal signals, so t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) will be introduced in greater numbers over the coming decade. Due to rapid advances in shared mobility and the slower development of fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), SAVs will likely be deployed before privately-owned AVs. Moreover, existing shared mobility services are transitioning their vehicle fleets toward tho...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Computational models embedded in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) require insights on drivers’ perception and understanding of their environment. This is particularly important as vehicles become increasingly automated and the partnership between the controllers (driver or vehicle) needs to be attentive to each other’s future intentions. T...
Article
Unpaired video-to-video translation aims to translate videos between a source and a target domain without the need of paired training data, making it more feasible for real applications. Unfortunately, the translated videos generally suffer from temporal and semantic inconsistency. To address this, many existing works adopt spatiotemporal consisten...
Preprint
Although partially autonomous driving (AD) systems are already available in production vehicles, drivers are still required to maintain a sufficient level of situational awareness (SA) during driving. Previous studies have shown that providing information about the AD's capability using user interfaces can improve the driver's SA. However, displayi...
Preprint
Unpaired video-to-video translation aims to translate videos between a source and a target domain without the need of paired training data, making it more feasible for real applications. Unfortunately, the translated videos generally suffer from temporal and semantic inconsistency. To address this, many existing works adopt spatiotemporal consisten...
Preprint
Situation awareness (SA) is generally considered as the perception, understanding, and projection of objects' properties and positions. We believe if the system can sense drivers' SA, it can appropriately provide warnings for objects that drivers are not aware of. To investigate drivers' awareness, in this study, a human-subject experiment of drivi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Trust calibration is necessary to ensure appropriate user acceptance in advanced automation technologies. A significant challenge to achieve trust calibration is to quantitatively estimate human trust in real-time. Although multiple trust models exist, these models have limited predictive performance partly due to individual differences in trust dy...
Article
Full-text available
In the present paper, we present a user study with an advanced-driver assistance system (ADAS) using augmented reality (AR) cues to highlight pedestrians and vehicles when approaching intersections of varying complexity. Our major goal is to understand the relationship between the presence and absence of AR, driver-initiated takeover rates and glan...
Article
Aomation has become prevalent in the everyday lives of humans. However, despite significant technological advancements, human supervision and intervention are still necessary in almost all sectors of automation, ranging from manufacturing and transportation to disaster management and health care [1]. Therefore, it is expected that the future will b...
Preprint
Full-text available
Properly calibrated human trust is essential for successful interaction between humans and automation. However, while human trust calibration can be improved by increased automation transparency, too much transparency can overwhelm human workload. To address this tradeoff, we present a probabilistic framework using a partially observable Markov dec...
Preprint
Full-text available
Human trust in automation plays an essential role in interactions between humans and automation. While a lack of trust can lead to a human's disuse of automation, over-trust can result in a human trusting a faulty autonomous system which could have negative consequences for the human. Therefore, human trust should be calibrated to optimize human-ma...
Thesis
Full-text available
Intelligent machines, and more broadly, intelligent systems, are becoming increasingly common in the everyday lives of humans. Nonetheless, despite significant advancements in automation, human supervision and intervention are still essential in almost all sectors, ranging from manufacturing and transportation to disaster-management and healthcare....
Article
Intelligent and autonomous technology is performing tasks from driving to healthcare, in which calibration of human trust in automation is critical. In this paper, we use a model-based clustering algorithm to identify and model dominant dynamics of human trust in automation among a general population. In doing so, we seek to balance the tradeoffs b...
Article
To attain improved human-machine collaboration, it is necessary for autonomous systems to infer human trust and workload and respond accordingly. In turn, autonomous systems require models that capture both human trust and workload dynamics. In a companion paper, we developed a trust-workload partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) mod...
Article
In this paper, we establish a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model framework that captures dynamic changes in human trust and workload for contexts that involve interactions between humans and intelligent decision-aid systems. We use a reconnaissance mission study to elicit a dynamic change in human trust and workload with res...
Article
We developed an experiment to elicit human trust dynamics in human–machine interaction contexts and established a quantitative model of human trust behavior with respect to these contexts. The proposed model describes human trust level as a function of experience, cumulative trust, and expectation bias. We estimated the model parameters using human...
Article
Today, intelligent machines \emph{interact and collaborate} with humans in a way that demands a greater level of trust between human and machine. A first step towards building intelligent machines that are capable of building and maintaining trust with humans is the design of a sensor that will enable machines to estimate human trust level in real-...
Preprint
Today, intelligent machines \emph{interact and collaborate} with humans in a way that demands a greater level of trust between human and machine. A first step towards building intelligent machines that are capable of building and maintaining trust with humans is the design of a sensor that will enable machines to estimate human trust level in real-...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In an increasingly automated world, trust between humans and autonomous systems is critical for successful integration of these systems into our daily lives. In particular, for autonomous systems to work cooperatively with humans, they must be able to sense and respond to the trust of the human. This inherently requires a control-oriented model of...
Article
Full-text available
Human trust in automation plays an important role in successful interactions between humans and machines. To design intelligent machines that can respond to changes in human trust, real-time sensing of trust level is needed. In this paper, we describe an empirical trust sensor model that maps psychophysiological measurements to human trust level. T...
Article
Full-text available
The Active Magnetic Bearings (AMBs) need a closed loop feedback controller for its stable operation. In the present work, a method has been proposed to design the preliminary controller for an unknown AMB system with knowledge of the maximum value of current that can be supplied to electromagnet and sampling rate of data acquisition system. This in...
Article
Full-text available
A procedure to design eight-pole electromagnetic bearing has been described. Necessary force and constraints equations have been detailed. Geometric limitations have been considered. Constraints are applied on losses occurring in the electromagnet. The magnetic force has been maximized using geometric programming method, which is easier to understa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Active Magnetic Bearings (AMBs) need a closed loop feedback controller for its stable operation. In the present work a method has been proposed to design the preliminary controller for an unknown AMB system with knowledge of the maximum value of current that can be supplied to electromagnet and sampling rate of data acquisition system. This ini...

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