In this master thesis, we address the area of user interfaces in autonomous trucks. In the theoretical part, we focus on autonomous driving, describe the levels of autonomy, and present the trucks and their specifications. We describe the main systems that make autonomous driving possible, the concept of driving in a convoy with a lead vehicle, which is already used in practice today. We also explore the current state of development of autonomous vehicles and briefly describe three of the most prominent developers of freight autonomous vehicles. We also touch on the safety perspective, presenting research on the safety of autonomous vehicles and outlining future EU safety requirements that will come into force in the future.
In the second part of the theoretical part, we touch upon human-machine interaction and describe how it affects the driver's perception of driving. We review the user interfaces in the trucks of the three manufacturers that sold the most vehicles in Slovenia in 2022. We focus mainly on the positioning, the size of the screens, but also on the layout of the elements and the amount of information that the user interfaces display. We also present situational awareness and cognitive load in autonomous vehicles.
Practical aim of our work is to develop and evaluate a user interface in an autonomous freight vehicle. We first design the user interface using the Figma tool and then develop it using web programming languages. We create three different on-road scenarios which serve us for the user study. In the study with drivers, we obtain data that can be used to analyse situational awareness, cognitive load, fixation points on certain elements and the subjective user experience. User study shows that the user interface enables a certain level of situational awareness of the drivers, while no cognitive load is shown in different vehicle manoeuvres compared to normal driving. The SUS questionnaire gives us an evaluation of the user experience and the result is a numerical value between 0 and 100, where the higher number means a better user experience.
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