Experts believe that fully automated vehicles, capable of performing all driving tasks autonomously, will have a highly positive impact on society. However, a coexistence of manual and automated driving is expected in the mid-term. Currently, the development of so-called conditionally automated vehicles is underway, which will be capable of fully automated driving in specific environments. In situations where such driving is no longer possible, the driver will be required to take over control of the vehicle. Performing a qualitative take-over is the subject of the investigation in this assignment.
In this dissertation, we propose a user interface that enables a comprehensive approach to the take-over of a conditionally automated vehicle by continuously monitoring the driver and providing additional assistance throughout the resolution of the situation. The core of the dissertation consists of four original scientific articles that describe the gradual development of the proposed interface through user studies.
In the first user study, we identified physiological signals providing a relevant description of the driver's state and evaluated measurement devices in a driving simulator. The results showed the unreliability of wrist-worn devices due to the hand movements associated with vehicle control. On the other hand, using a chest strap, we were able to detect statistically significant differences between various levels of driving task complexity. In the second user study, we designed and evaluated simple auditory-visual and tactile-visual user interfaces for initiating a take-over request. Based on the results, we designed a comprehensive approach to take-over, continuously monitoring the driver and providing additional assistance, and evaluated it in the third user study. We showed that the mechanism of automatic gradual braking, additional warnings in case of inappropriate behaviour, emergency braking, and the possibility of partial take-over complement the multimodal take-over request, thus enhancing the quality of take-over of a conditionally automated vehicle.
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