Situation awareness

About: Situation awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7380 publications have been published within this topic receiving 108695 citations. The topic is also known as: SA & situational awareness.

Introducing Structural Considerations into Complexity Metrics

Abstract: Field observations and focused interviews of Air Traffic Controllers have been used to generate a list of key complexity factors in Air Traffic Control. The underlying structure of the airspace was identified as relevant in many of the factors. A preliminary investigation has revealed that the structure appears to form the basis for abstractions that reduce the difficulty of maintaining Situational Awareness, particularly the projection of future traffic situations. Three examples of such abstractions were identified: standard flows, groupings, and critical points. Preliminary approaches to developing metrics including these structural considerations are discussed.

From Car-Driver-Handovers to Cooperative Interfaces: Visions for Driver–Vehicle Interaction in Automated Driving

Abstract: As long as automated vehicles are not able to handle driving in every possible situation, drivers will still have to take part in the driving task from time to time. Recent research focused on handing over control entirely when automated systems reach their boundaries. Our overview on research in this domain shows that handovers are feasible, however, they are not a satisfactory solution since human factor issues such as reduced situation awareness arise in automated driving. In consequence, we suggest to implement cooperative interfaces to enable automated driving even with imperfect automation. We recommend to consider four basic requirements for driver–vehicle cooperation: mutual predictability, directability, shared situation representation, and calibrated trust in automation. We present research that can be seen as a step towards cooperative interfaces in regard to these requirements. Nevertheless, these systems are only solutions for parts of future cooperative interfaces and interaction concepts. Future design of interaction concepts in automated driving should integrate the cooperative approach in total in order to achieve safe and comfortable automated mobility.

Haptic seat for automated driving: preparing the driver to take control effectively

Abstract: Drivers' situation awareness is known to be remarkably low in the automated driving mode, which can result in a delayed and inefficient response when requested to resume control of the vehicle. The present study examined the usefulness of a haptic seat that projects spatial information on approaching vehicles to facilitate drivers' preparedness to take control of the vehicle. The results of a simulator study on 26 participants using behavioral and eye tracking techniques showed that when required to regain control, having haptic seat led to faster reactions in scenarios requiring lane changing. The haptic seat also reduced the probability that the participants would slow down below acceptable speeds on a freeway. Eye tracking showed that drivers had a more systematic scan of the environment in the first two seconds following the transition of control with a haptic seat. Overall, these findings suggest that the haptic seat can play a significant role in keeping drivers aware of surrounding traffic during automated driving, and consequently facilitate the control transitions between the vehicle and the driver.

Human-robot Teaming for Rescue Missions: Team ViGIR's Approach to the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

Abstract: Team ViGIR entered the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge DRC with a focus on developing software to enable an operator to guide a humanoid robot through the series of challenge tasks emulating disaster response scenarios. The overarching philosophy was to make our operators full team members and not just mere supervisors. We designed our operator control station OCS to allow multiple operators to request and share information as needed to maintain situational awareness under bandwidth constraints, while directing the robot to perform tasks with most planning and control taking place onboard the robot. Given the limited development time, we leveraged a number of open source libraries in both our onboard software and our OCS design; this included significant use of the robot operating system libraries and toolchain. This paper describes the high level approach, including the OCS design and major onboard components, and it presents our DRC Trials results. The paper concludes with a number of lessons learned that are being applied to the final phase of the competition and are useful for related projects as well.