Currently, students acquire driving skills by practicing in actual traffic conditions and through direct interactions with an instructor. While one-on-one interactions could be tailored to a student’s learning style and skill level, making them effective for learning, one-on-one interactions are also inefficient, potentially costly, and not standardized with limitations on which traffic situation can be safely taught. For these exact reasons Way AS has developed and commercially deployed a virtual driving instructor that educates students in high-fidelity simulators. In this paper, we present a module, the Lesson generator, that extends the virtual driving instructor to generate personalized lessons for individual students with the goal to practice in a focused and deliberately fashion the skills that need practice for the students to become proficient drivers. A case study is presented, and the path to deployment is discussed.

This paper introduces the design, development, and deployment of a Virtual Driving Instructor (VDI) for enhanced driver education. The VDI provides personalized, real-time feedback to students in a driving simulator, addressing some of the limitations of traditional driver instruction. Employing a hybrid AI system, the VDI combines rule-based agents, learning-based agents, knowledge graphs, and Bayesian networks to assess and monitor student performance in a comprehensive manner. Implemented in multiple simulators at a driving school in Norway, the system aims to leverage AI and driving simulation to improve both the learning experience and the efficiency of instruction. Initial feedback from students has been largely positive, highlighting the effectiveness of this integration while also pointing to areas for further improvement. This work marks a significant stride in infusing technology into driver education, offering a scalable and efficient approach to instruction.