In this review, we provide an overview of emerging trends and challenges in the field of intelligent and autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles. Recent advances in the field of perception, planning,...

Planning and Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles

Literature points to persistent issues in human-automation interaction, which are caused either when the human does not understand the automation or when the automation does not understand the human. Design guidelines for human-automation interaction aim to avoid such issues and commonly agree that the human should have continuous interaction and communication with the automation system and its authority level and should retain final authority. This paper argues that haptic shared control is a promising approach to meet the commonly voiced design guidelines for human-automation interaction, especially for automotive applications. The goal of the paper is to provide evidence for this statement, by discussing several realizations of haptic shared control found in literature. We show that literature provides ample experimental evidence that haptic shared control can lead to short-term performance benefits (e.g., faster and more accurate vehicle control; lower levels of control effort; reduced demand for visual attention). We conclude that although the continuous intuitive physical interaction inherent in haptic shared control is expected to reduce long-term issues with human-automation interaction, little experimental evidence for this is provided. Therefore, future research on haptic shared control should focus more on issues related to long-term use such as trust, overreliance, dependency on the system, and retention of skills.

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Haptic shared control: smoothly shifting control authority?

Since the strict separation of working spaces of humans and robots has experienced a softening due to recent robotics research achievements, close interaction of humans and robots comes rapidly into reach. In this context, physical human-robot interaction raises a number of questions regarding a desired intuitive robot behavior. The continuous bilateral information and energy exchange requires an appropriate continuous robot feedback. Investigating a cooperative manipulation task, the desired behavior is a combination of an urge to fulfill the task, a smooth instant reactive behavior to human force inputs and an assignment of the task effort to the cooperating agents. In this paper, a formal analysis of human-robot cooperative load transport is presented. Three different possibilities for the assignment of task effort are proposed. Two proposed dynamic role exchange mechanisms adjust the robot's urge to complete the task based on the human feedback. For comparison, a static role allocation strategy not relying on the human agreement feedback is investigated as well. All three role allocation mechanisms are evaluated in a user study that involves large-scale kinesthetic interaction and full-body human motion. Results show tradeoffs between subjective and objective performance measures stating a clear objective advantage of the proposed dynamic role allocation scheme.

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The role of roles: Physical cooperation between humans and robots

Intelligence in vehicles has developed through the years as self-driving expectations and capabilities have increased. To date, the majority of the literature has focused on longitudinal control topics (e.g. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Cooperative ACC (CACC), etc.). To a lesser extent, there have been a variety of research articles specifically dealing with lateral control, e.g., maneuvers such as lane changes and merging. This paper provides a survey of this particular area of vehicle automation. The key topics addressed are control systems, positioning systems, communication systems, simulation modeling, field tests, surroundings vehicles, and human factors. Overall, there has been some successful research and field testing in lane change and merge maneuvers; however, there is a strong need for standardization and even more research to enable comprehensive field testing of these lateral maneuvers, so that commercial implementation of automated vehicles can be realized.

Lane Change and Merge Maneuvers for Connected and Automated Vehicles: A Survey

OBJECTIVE: Haptic shared control was investigated as a human-machine interface that can intuitively share control between drivers and an automatic controller for curve negotiation. BACKGROUND: As long as automation systems are not fully reliable, a role remains for the driver to be vigilant to the system and the environment to catch any automation errors. The conventional binary switches between supervisory and manual control has many known issues, and haptic shared control is a promising alternative. METHOD: A total of 42 respondents of varying age and driving experience participated in a driving experiment in a fixed-base simulator, in which curve negotiation behavior during shared control was compared to during manual control, as well as to three haptic tunings of an automatic controller without driver intervention. RESULTS: Under the experimental conditions studied, the main beneficial effect of haptic shared control compared to manual control was that less control activity (16% in steering wheel reversal rate, 15% in standard deviation of steering wheel angle) was needed for realizing an improved safety performance (e.g., 11% in peak lateral error). Full automation removed the need for any human control activity and improved safety performance (e.g., 35% in peak lateral error) but put the human in a supervisory position. CONCLUSION: Haptic shared control kept the driver in the loop, with enhanced performance at reduced control activity, mitigating the known issues that plague full automation. APPLICATION: Haptic support for vehicular control ultimately seeks to intuitively combine human intelligence and creativity with the benefits of automation systems. Language: en

Sharing Control With Haptics: Seamless Driver Support From Manual to Automatic Control

Shared control is an increasingly popular approach to facilitate control and communication between humans and intelligent machines. However, there is little consensus in guidelines for design and evaluation of shared control, or even in a definition of what constitutes shared control. This lack of consensus complicates cross fertilization of shared control research between different application domains. This paper provides a definition for shared control in context with previous definitions, and a set of general axioms for design and evaluation of shared control solutions. The utility of the definition and axioms are demonstrated by applying them to four application domains: automotive, robot-assisted surgery, brain–machine interfaces, and learning. Literature is discussed for each of these four domains in light of the proposed definition and axioms. Finally, to facilitate design choices for other applications, we propose a hierarchical framework for shared control that links the shared control literature with traded control, co-operative control, and other human–automation interaction methods. Future work should reveal the generalizability and utility of the proposed shared control framework in designing useful, safe, and comfortable interaction between humans and intelligent machines.

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A Topology of Shared Control Systems—Finding Common Ground in Diversity

The challenges in designing human-machine interaction have been around for decades: how to combine the intelligence and creativity of humans with the precision and strength of machines? It is well known that manual control tasks are prone to human errors. The conventional engineering solution is to either fully automate a (sub)task or to support the human with alerting systems. Both approaches have inherent limitations, widely described in literature (e.g., Pritchett, 2001; Sheridan, 2002). Recently, an alternative solution is receiving increased attention: that of shared control. In the shared control paradigm, an intelligent system continually shares the control authority with the human controller. The idea behind shared control is to keep the human operator in the direct manual control loop, while providing continuous support. Shared control has been investigated for a wide range of applications, for example during the direct control of automobiles (e.g., Griffiths & Gillespie, 2005; Mulder et al., 2008a&b) and aircraft (e.g., Goodrich et al., 2008), or during tele-operated control to support gripping (Griffin et al., 2005), surgery (e.g, Kragic et al., 2005), micro-assembly (e.g, Basdogan et al., 2007) or the steering of unmanned aerial vehicles (e.g., Mung et al., 2009).

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Neuromuscular Analysis as a Guideline in designing Shared Control

A large number of haptic driver support systems have been described in the scientific literature. However, there is little consensus regarding the design, evaluation methods, and effectiveness of these systems. This literature survey aimed to investigate: (1) what haptic systems (in terms of function, haptic signal, channel, and supported task) have been experimentally tested, (2) how these haptic systems have been evaluated, and (3) their reported effects on driver performance and behaviour. We reviewed empirical research in which participants had to drive a vehicle in a real or simulated environment, were able to control the heading and/or speed of the vehicle, and a haptic signal was provided to them. The results indicated that a clear distinction can be made between warning systems (using vibrations) and guidance systems (using continuous forces). Studies typically used reaction time measures for evaluating warning systems and vehicle-centred performance measures for evaluating guidance systems. In general, haptic warning systems reduced the reaction time of a driver compared to no warnings, although these systems may cause annoyance. Guidance systems generally improved the performance of drivers compared to non-aided driving, but these systems may suffer from after-effects. Longitudinal research is needed to investigate the transfer and retention of effects caused by haptic support systems.

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Mark Mulder

Papers

Haptic shared control: smoothly shifting control authority?

Sharing Control With Haptics: Seamless Driver Support From Manual to Automatic Control

A Topology of Shared Control Systems—Finding Common Ground in Diversity

Neuromuscular Analysis as a Guideline in designing Shared Control

The Effect of Haptic Support Systems on Driver Performance: A Literature Survey