Ambient Light- Lightbased HMI for automated driving

Abstract

The paper presents results of a simulator study testing a novel HMI for automated vehicles. Vehicle manufactures are ready to implement the first generation of automated driving on public roads. Automated vehicles will enable drivers to perform secondary tasks while the automation is controlling the vehicle. However, the current generation of sensors will not be good enough to handle all kinds of traffic scenarios. Therefore, there might be situations in which the driver needs to monitor the automated vehicle control (transition from SAE level 3 or higher to SAE level 2). For this monitoring task the driver needs to build up a good situation awareness to understand and judge the automation behavior and intervene if the automation behaves inappropriate. To support the driver we tested a 360° LED Ambient Light Display to present information about the current automation level and objects detected by the automation. The poster presents the results of a simulator study with 40 participants tested in a between-subject design who experienced different interaction designs. The results indicate that additional information regarding objects detected by the automation is beneficial for building up a better situation awareness and support drivers in understanding and foreseeing the behavior of the automation. This results in faster reaction times of the driver in case of an automation failure.