Impact of Directive Visual Information on Driver's Emergency Behavior

Abstract

Advances in autonomous driving will inevitably decrease the opportunities of human drivers to manually maneuver in normal situations, and this will make it difficult for a driver to constantly keep his/her concentration on the driving task. On the other hand, until fully autonomous driving becomes a reality, human drivers will still be required to continuously monitor an autonomous system and be able to immediately take over the driving task if necessary (e.g., during a system failure). This study's simulator-based experiments investigate the relationship between a driver's emergency behaviors and the information displayed to the driver. In the experiment, the subject participates in simulated autonomous driving where his/her vehicle runs in the center lane of a three-lane highway in a low-visibility (fog) situation. After a 7- to 8-minute drive, the subject encounters an emergency situation where an obstacle vehicle with flashing hazard lamps appears in front of the subject's vehicle. In this situation, only a simple warning sign and an alarm sound are displayed to half of the experiment's subjects. To the remaining haif, directive visual information (an arrow sign) to indicate the steering direction was displayed on a HUD (head-up display) area in addition to the warning sign and alarm sound. The experimental results suggest a strong ability of the directive information to change the driver's behavior in emergency situations.