A new haptic shared controller reducing steering conflicts

When drivers have opposing intentions to a haptic shared controller which, like the driver, can continuously control the vehicle through torques on the steering wheel, the driver has to fight against the controller torque to reach their goal. This phenomenon is called haptic shared control (steering) conflicts and are a reason for drivers to reject such automation. This study is the first to realise an implementation of the novel ”Four-Design-Choice-Architecture” design philosophy for shared control, hypothesized to reduce conflicts through its inherent control structure. The implemented haptic shared controller decouples reference trajectory from independent feedback and feedforward haptic control. The implemented Four-Design-Choice haptic shared controller is compared to the baseline (predecessor) Meshed haptic shared controller through a simulator experiment. The results show that the new shared controller significantly reduces occurrence of conflicts by a factor 2.3 and significantly reduces driver torque by a factor of 3.2. Analysis shows that the novel feed-forward haptic torque and a reference trajectory supporting the drivers future (curve-entry) intentions are the dominant players in conflict reduction. The findings show that the Four-Design-Choice-Architecture is proven very effective and has large potential to further reduce conflicts with different design settings.