Complementing Haptic Shared Control with visual feedback for obstacle avoidance

For automated vehicles (SAE Level 2-3) part of the challenge lies in communicating to the driver what control actions the automation is taking and will take, and what its capabilities are. A promising approach is haptic shared control (HSC), which uses continuous torques on the steering wheel to communicate the automation’s current control actions. However, torques on the steering wheel cannot communicate future spatiotemporal constraints, that might be required to judge appropriate overtaking or obstacle avoidance. A visualisation of predicted vehicle trajectory, along with velocity-dependent constraints with respect to achievable trajectories is proposed. The goal of this paper is to experimentally compare obstacle avoidance behaviour while driving with the designed visualisation against driving with a previously designed HSC, as well as the two support systems combined. It is expected that adding visual feedback improves obstacle avoidance and user acceptance, and reduces control effort with respect to HSC only. In a driving simulator experiment, 26 participants drove three trials with each feedback condition (visual, HSC, and combination) and had to avoid obstacles that appeared with a Time to collision of either 1.85 s (critical) or 4.7 s (non-criticall). Results showed that, compared to HSC only, the HSC and visual combination yielded slightly smaller safety margins to the obstacle, a significant reduction of control activity on straights, and increased subjective acceptance rating. Visual and HSC offered a beneficial synergy, as it seemed the visual feedback allowed drivers to anticipate the effect of their steering actions on the car’s trajectory more accurately, and the HSC reduced the intra-subject variability. Future research should investigate the effects of added visual feedback in more detail, specifically in terms of the effectiveness to communicate automation capabilities and driver gaze behavior.