A study on controlling method for an autonomous personal vehicle based on user's heart rate variability

Humans react to their surroundings based on their evaluation of the environment sensed by their five physical senses. We refer to this as the recognition-evaluation-action (REA) cycle. On another front, autonomous personal vehicles base their evaluation of the surrounding environment on information obtained through their sensors. This cycle is called the action cycle. In this study, we aim to identify an entrainment method between humans' REA cycle and autonomous personal vehicle action cycle, analyzing what occurs when these cycles correspond. In this study, we focus on entrainment between human environment evaluation and those of autonomous personal vehicles. This perspective has not been considered in previous studies; however its inclusion is essential to ensure that autonomous personal vehicles are not mere vehicles but a part of the passenger's body, as these become more common. In this study, we chose heart rate as the physiological index, because heart rate is affected by human environmental evaluations. We utilized the entrainment between human environmental evaluation and autonomous personal vehicle environmental evaluation as the method to associate heart rate with the action updating frequency. In addition, we conducted a study using our personal vehicle. In the results, a sigmoid function which showed that heart frequency was positively correlated with the action updating frequency; this shows that autonomous personal vehicles can operated according to their user's environmental evaluations.