Human-Ai Cooperative Driving Through Emotion-Aware Decision Making and Driver Personalization

Abstract

Conventional in-vehicle safety systems often neglect real-time emotional monitoring, prediction, and passenger influence, leading to reactive rather than proactive interventions. This paper presents an emotion-aware cooperative driving system that combines facial emotion recognition, time-series emotion forecasting, and personalized music-based regulation. The system detects both driver and front-seat passenger emotions through a Vision Transformer (ViT) model, while a time-series model anticipates the driver's upcoming emotional state. A prioritization algorithm ensures driver emotions hold precedence, with passenger states considered when the driver is stable. Based on this prioritized emotional context, the system regulates the in-cabin atmosphere using music recommendations drawn from the driver's preferred artists via the Spotify API. Experimental results show robust real-time emotion classification (86.4% validation accuracy), proactive forecasting (81.6% predictive accuracy), and improved driver acceptance due to personalization. The proposed framework advances intelligent transportation by shifting from static monitoring toward predictive, human-centered, and non-intrusive emotional regulation, thereby enhancing both safety and user comfort.