Abstract
With the introduction of advanced driving assistance systems managing longitudinal and lateral control, conditional automated driving is seemingly in near future of series vehicles. While take-over behavior in the passenger car context has been investigated intensively in recent years, publications on semi-trucks with professional drivers are sparse. The effects influencing expert drivers during take-overs in this context lack thorough investigation and are required to design systems that facilitate safe take-overs. While multiple findings seem to cohere in passenger cars and semi-trucks, these findings rely on simulated studies without taking environments as found in the real world into account. A test track study was conducted, simulating highway driving with 27 professional non-affiliated truck drivers. The participants drove an automated Level 3 semi-truck while a non-driving-related task was available. Multiple time critical take-over situations were initiated during the drives to investigate four main objectives regarding driver behavior. (1) With these results, comparison of reaction times and behavior can be drawn to previous simulator studies. The effect of situation criticality (2) and training (3) of take-over situations is investigated. (4) The influence of warning expectation on driver behavior is explored. Results obtained displayed very quick time to hands on steering and time to first reaction all under 2.4 s. Highly critical situations generate very quick reaction times M = 0.81 s, while the manipulation of expectancy yielded no significant variation in reaction times. These reaction times serve as a reference of what can be expected from drivers under optimal take-over conditions, with quick reactions at high speed in critical situations.
Highlights
The term ‘automated driving’ has become a global discussion point in recent years, with political and social interests rising to develop vehicles enabling automation
Due to the fact that the prototypic vehicle was not fitted with a capacitive steering wheel, the time to hands on steering (TTHoS) were evaluated from a synchronised video of the drives
On average during the experiment phase, this resulted in a time to first reaction (TTFR) (M = 1.087 s, SD = 0.417 s), TTHoS (M = 0.727 s, SD = 0.253 s), and Time to eyes on road (TTEoR) (M = 0.364 s, SD = 0.425 s) for a total of 162 take-overs in which the hands were off the steering
Summary
The term ‘automated driving’ has become a global discussion point in recent years, with political and social interests rising to develop vehicles enabling automation. 10587 Berlin, Germany (Tesla 2019) and the Mercedes Active Drive Assist for trucks (Daimler 2018). Research within the field of automation transitions has shown that human capabilities can deteriorate due to task switching (Bainbridge 1983; Wylie et al 2000) and a lack of situation awareness (Endsley 1995; Young et al 2002). These effects apply to advanced assistance systems in vehicles (Brookhuis et al 2001; de Winter et al 2014). If these theoretical constructs apply to the vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems, the question that is at the core of ongoing research is: how long do drivers require to regain control of vehicles safely (Gold et al 2013)?
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