Adaptive passenger comfort enhancement in autonomous vehicles

A method for adaptively updating passenger comfort enhancement in an autonomous vehicle, the method comprising:

• determining a source-destination route based on a vehicle initial position, destination, and route information for the source-destination route, the route information comprising road curvature and road speed limits for each of a plurality of route segments of the source-destination route;
• obtaining passenger feedback for each route segment during vehicle operation over the source-destination route, the passenger feedback comprising passenger audio data and passenger image data;
• updating a reward function comprising a plurality of driving states, the updating based on a previous reward function and the passenger feedback;
• updating a goal function for each route segment based on a previous goal function and an optimized driving state transition from a first driving state to a second driving state, wherein the optimized driving state transition is based on the updated reward function;
• and
• dynamically updating a vehicle speed for each route segment based on the updated goal function.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium that stores instructions for execution by processing circuitry of an autonomous vehicle to perform operations that:

• generate a reward function comprising a plurality of driving state transitions;
• update the reward function based on destination information and passenger feedback including data representative of voice and image responses;
• generate a goal function that determines an optimized driving state transition;
• update the goal function based on the updated reward function and a previous goal function;
• and
• generate a vehicle speed control signal to control the autonomous vehicle speed based on the updated goal function.