Towards Cooperative Driving: Involving the Driver in an Autonomous Vehicle's Decision Making

Abstract

Although there are already fully autonomous vehicles on the roads for testing purposes, a rollout is far away. Autonomous vehicles are still not able to handle everyday driving and remain reliant on the driver when they reach their system limitations. One suggested approach to this problem is handing over the control entirely to the driver, which might become annoying when such situations occur frequently. In contrast, we suggest the usage of cooperative interfaces to avoid full handovers in situations in which the system needs the driver, for instance to approve or monitor a specific maneuver. A driving simulator study with 32 participants revealed that they felt comfortable choosing how the system should handle a situation. They reportedly assessed the situations first instead of relying blindly on the system and were able to handle every situation safely. We report lessons learned regarding cooperative interaction and interfaces, and their in-lab evaluation.