Automated Driving Functions Giving Control Back to the Driver: A Simulator Study on Driver State Dependent Strategies

Many car companies and other organisations are working hard to get automated driving on the road. Where some prefer driverless cars, most foresee a future where control of the vehicle will be shared between the driver and automated functions in the coming years. Sharing tasks and responsibilities creates the interesting challenge of transition of control of the vehicle between driver and automation. This paper presents research into this transition. By taking into account the attentiveness of the driver, different strategies were evaluated in a simulator study to create an optimal transition given the situation at hand. The study concentrates on an automated platoon system ‘Virtual Tow Bar’. The results show that the differences among the tested conditions are small and no large trends are visible in either the subjective or the objective results. Hence it is concluded that the experiment should be repeated with a larger group naive participants and probably more extreme parameter settings.