Design Factors of Shared Situation Awareness Interface in Human–Machine Co-Driving

Abstract

Automated vehicles can perceive their environment and control themselves, but how to effectively transfer the information perceived by the vehicles to human drivers through interfaces, or share the awareness of the situation, is a problem to be solved in human–machine co-driving. The four elements of the shared situation awareness (SSA) interface, namely human–machine state, context, current task status, and plan, were analyzed and proposed through an abstraction hierarchy design method to guide the output of the corresponding interface design elements. The four elements were introduced to visualize the interface elements and design the interface prototype in the scenario of “a vehicle overtaking with a dangerous intention from the left rear”, and the design schemes were experimentally evaluated. The results showed that the design with the four elements of an SSA interface could effectively improve the usability of the human–machine interface, increase the levels of human drivers’ situational awareness and prediction of dangerous intentions, and boost trust in the automatic systems, thereby providing ideas for the design of human–machine collaborative interfaces that enhance shared situational awareness in similar scenarios.