Development of a Human-Machine Interface to support remote drivers getting into the loop during event-based remote driving.

Kurzfassung

Highly Automated Vehicles (HAV; SAE Level-4) are expected to shape future traffic and offer a wide range of benefits. However, achieving these benefits, depends on overcoming traffic situations that are beyond the current technological capabilities of HAVs. Here, one approach could be to issue a take-over request to a remote driver (RD). In these events, the RD proceeds to take over the dynamic driving task for the HAV remotely. This leads to challenges in getting the RD into a state of "being in the loop" (i.e., taking control and monitoring the traffic situation without being physically present on site). These challenges can lead to potentially safety-critical RD task performance impairments. To date, this novel challenge has been largely unexplored. We propose that RDs can be provided with information about the traffic situation and the driving task in advance, to support them getting into the loop. This "briefing" should improve take-over performance, safety, and usability. We expect that a Human-Machine Interface (HMI) to be a feasible approach to present this "briefing", prior to delivering video streams of the traffic situation, by providing an overview of the information continuously gathered by the HAV. In an experimental user study, we investigated how the information quality and quantity provided via an HMI supports RDs getting into the loop. In this study, participants encountered typical remote driving tasks displayed in a simulated environment either with varying "briefing" HMI design. Findings improve understanding of the information provision to RDs while also increasing safety of remote driving.