AutoConduct

Driving automation, either level 3 (including unplanned manual control recovery) or level 4 (fully automated driving on specific road sections), introduces new safety and acceptability issues. In order to improve road safety by integrating advanced safety technologies, we must ensure that this new technology takes into account the needs and expectations of the drivers, on the one hand, and the predicable changes in user behavior, on the other hand. A Human Factors working group, bringing together the main French actors of driving automation, has been set up within the NFI plan (investment plan for the future) “autonomous driving” (http://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/PDF /nouvelle-france- industrielle-sept-2014.pdf) to prioritize these issues. AutoConduct project aims to design a new Human-Machin Interaction (HMI) based on needs analyses and adapted to the driver’s condition in response to priorities identified by this working group. For this purpose, the current project will offer advanced monitoring of the driver by combining different diagnoses (physical state defined by the posture, internal states defined by emotions and cognitive load, and perceptive state defined by visual strategies) to adapt the management of interactions between the driver and the vehicle automation in real time. Use cases examined in the project will investigate transitions from manual to automated driving, and vice versa as well as transitions from automated driving to manual. HMI management and acceptability in specific use cases (e.g. safety maneuvering process initiated by the system) will also be investigated. The advanced driver monitoring system and the interface developed by the project will be integrated in two instrumented vehicles. A wizard of Oz instrumented vehicle (i.e. the active controls are managed by a professional driver hidden from the driver’s view) will integrate driver monitoring and feedback interaction to test HMI acceptability and robustness of diagnostics on public roads. A second instrumented vehicle will integrate the entire system, including active controls of the speed and direction of the vehicle, to test the acceptability and robustness of HMI in a controlled environment (i.e. test track). The results of these evaluations will contribute to improve the safety and the effectiveness of the design of automated vehicle as well as providing inputs and recommendations for driver training on automated driving. The originality of this project is to (1) adopt a user-centric approach based on the needs of human factors and ergonomics (2) take into account acceptability (a priori and after experience with the system) at the early, design stages of automated vehicle, which, until now, were developed primarily based on technological criterion, (3) treat the driver’s state through objective measures of indicators on three dimensions: physical, perceptual, and internal (attentional and emotional), (4) develop a progressively shared vehicle control (i.e. cooperation) based on a physiologically valid sensorimotor control model. This type of user-centric approach, already adopted by the Humanist Network of Excellence "Human centered design for ITS", has proven to be effective for other applications dedicated to the driver in the development of prototypes. It will, thus, consist in applying a user-centered approach to the field of automated driving and developing validation methodologies of adaptive strategies in naturalistic conditions. The current project is following ABV, PARTAGE, and CocoVeA projects (focusing on level 2 of automation) and capitalizes the results of the European project ACROSS in the field of pilot monitoring applied to aeronautics.