What if the Automation Fails? – A Classification of Scenarios in Teleoperated Driving

Abstract

Teleoperated driving as an enabler has the potential to bridge the gap to fully automated driving (SAE Level 5 [13]) by monitoring and controlling remotely highly automated vehicles (AVs, SAE 4) whenever their automation fails to do so. To ensure safe and efficient teleoperation, a user-centered human-machine interface (HMI) considering use cases, scenarios, and sequences relevant in teleoperated driving needs to be designed. For this purpose, this paper presents as a grounding an extensive system to classify scenarios relevant to remote-controlled AVs from a control center perspective. It is based on four major categories pertaining to the vehicles, the teleoperation workstation, interaction partners, and the environment. The system will serve as a scaffolding to categorize a catalogue of more than 150 scenarios derived from several research projects and this system will be adapted in future research to fit an ever-broader range of scenarios in the teleoperation of AVs.