Project overview
Cars that can drive themselves have been predicted for some time, but they are nearly with us. Highly automated vehicles are likely to be on public roads within the next ten years. The largest gap in our understanding of vehicle automation is how drivers will react to this new technology and how best to design the driver-automation interaction.
This project aimed to answer these questions by using Human Factors methodologies to model driver behaviour for level 3 semi-autonomous vehicles. It studied a wide range of drivers with different driving experience in simulators, and in road going vehicles.
During the course of the research the Universities of Cambridge and Southampton worked closely with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) engineers to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of technological innovation in vehicle automation.
The project developed a new approach for the design of handovers between vehicle automation and the human driver. The approach brings together a range of methods from user-centred design, inclusive design and ecological interface design. Following an iterative design process, this approach has been used to design customisable human-machine interfaces for automation-driver handovers.
This project discovered that there were links between customization and user performance. In particular, the handover times were quicker (on average, but with a greater range) with customized settings than the defaults. Drivers much preferred the customized settings to the defaults and there was no adverse affect on post-handover driving performance (in terms of lane and speed stability). This is one of the first studies of its type in the UK and Europe, with a genuine automated vehicle driving (rather than being driven by a surrogate driver from the passenger seat or rear of the vehicle).
Further information is available from the UKRI website.
