Empathic Vehicle At The Sumo Anniversary Conference In Berlin
31 August, 2026
A poster on the “Empathic Vehicle” with simulator-based emotion recognition was presented. International experts provided insights into SUMO integration and future collaborations.
The 25th anniversary of SUMO was celebrated in Berlin in early June 2026. SUMO stands for Simulation of Urban MObility and is an open-source traffic flow simulator co-developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
Niklas Fraissl, a junior lecturer and researcher from the Digital Enterprise & UX Competence Area, attended the event in Berlin from June 2 to 4, 2026, where he gained insight into current advancements as well as outstanding challenges in traffic and mobility simulation.
User Study from the Empathic Vehicle Research Project Presented
At the anniversary conference, he presented the second user study from the Empathic Vehicle research project in the form of a poster titled “Towards Empathic Vehicles: Simulator-Based Induction of Affective States for Emotion Recognition.” The poster showcased the preliminary results of the literature review and the next steps involving the driving simulator, which was specially set up and programmed for this purpose.
Published Poster:
The published poster is also available at the following link:
https://sumo.dlr.de/poster/poster-8.pdf
The international conference participants received the topic with great interest, discussed possible future projects, and provided suggestions for integrating SUMO into the current driving simulator.
After the conference, the team took the overnight train back to Vienna to continue the ongoing user study.
Vehicles should recognize passengers’ body language and emotional states
Since January 2024, the team behind the Empathic Vehicle research project at the Vienna University of Applied Sciences (FH Technikum Wien) has been working to equip vehicles with the ability to recognize the body language and emotional states of their occupants and respond accordingly. This is based on the latest technologies in the fields of computer vision and machine learning.
The Empathic Vehicle research project is funded by the Vienna Business Agency. For more information, see the Empathic Vehicle project page here.
Further Information:
Vehicles That Understand Emotions: Empathic Vehicle at IHIET-AI 2026 in Valencia
Empathic Vehicle: Presentation of Initial Project Results at the AIRoV 2025 Conference in Klagenfurt
Emotion recognition in vehicles: Update on the Empathic Vehicle project
Rethinking mobility: The next step toward smart driving with Empathic Vehicle
Road safety and UX combined: Empathic Vehicle shapes the future of driving
Faculty of Computer Sciences & Applied Mathematics
