Towards User-Focused Automated Vehicles Supporting Mobile Office Work

Abstract

Advances in the development of vehicle automation promise that humans may soon be relieved from the burden of manual driving at least during certain phases. For instance, humans in future vehicles may use the cockpit as mobile office when highway automation is activated, but be the driver in rural areas, when full automation is not available. Since mobile office workers have different needs than drivers, this imposes specific requirements on in-vehicle software and hardware. One option to meet these requirements is the development of user-focused automation that puts human needs into the centre of system design. Systems with user-focused automation derive the current needs of the occupants by combining user and context monitoring using various sensors in real time. Based on this, the system behaviour could be adapted by adjusting the interior lighting or the information on a human-machine interface. Here, we present the current status of the development of a driving-simulator-based demonstrator for the interior of an automated vehicle supporting mobile office work through user-focused automation. In a first driving simulator study, we developed a real-time capable classifier to estimate the user’s current activity (driving, relaxing or working) and stress level. Next, we evaluated how different concepts of interior lighting including spectrally-adaptable ambient lights and focused spot lights as well as changes in the navigation system can support the different activities. In a final study, the different components will be integrated and evaluated to demonstrate the potential of user-focused automation to support varying needs of users in automated vehicles.