Design of On-body Tactile Displays to Enhance Situation Awareness in Automated Vehicles

Fatalities with semi-automated vehicles typically occur when users are engaged in non-driving related tasks (NDRTs) that compromise their situational awareness (SA). This work developed a tactile display for on-body notification to support situational awareness, thus enabling users to recognize vehicle automation failures and intervene if necessary. We investigated whether such tactile notifications support "event detection'' (SA-L1) or 2 "anticipation'" (SA-L3). Using a simulated automated driving scenario, a between-groups study contrasted SA-L1 and SA-L3 tactile notifications that respectively displayed the spatial positions of surrounding traffic or future projection of the automated vehicle's position. Our participants were engaged in an NDRT, i.e., an Operation Span Task that engaged visual working memory (WM) resources. They were instructed to intervene if the tactile display contradicted the driving scenario, thus indicating vehicle sensing failures. On a single critical trial, we introduced a failure that could have resulted in a vehicle collision. SA-L1 tactile displays of potential collision targets resulted in less subjective workload on the NDRT than SA-L3, which indicated the vehicle's future actions. These findings and qualitative questionnaire suggest that the simplicity of SA-L1 display required less mental resources, which allowed participants to better interpret sensing failures in vehicle automation. We make available data on intervention performance (distance, Maximum intensity, Time to Collision), WM performance (Attention and WM interference), qualitative questionnaire (NASA-TLX and SART), together with subjective questions from the semistructured interview and Unity VR environment.

半自动化车辆事故通常发生在用户从事与驾驶无关的任务（NDRTs）时，这些任务损害了他们的情境意识（SA）。本研究开发了一种用于身体通知的触觉显示器，以支持情境意识，从而使用户能够识别车辆自动化故障并在必要时进行干预。我们调查了此类触觉通知是否支持“事件检测”（SA-L1）或“预测”（SA-L3）。在模拟的自动驾驶场景中，一项分组间研究对比了分别显示周围交通空间位置或自动驾驶车辆未来位置预测的SA-L1和SA-L3触觉通知。我们的参与者从事NDRT，即涉及视觉工作记忆（WM）资源的操作跨度任务。他们被指示如果触觉显示器与驾驶场景相矛盾，则进行干预，从而指示车辆感知故障。在单一关键试验中，我们引入了一种可能导致车辆碰撞的故障。与表示车辆未来行为的SA-L3相比，潜在的碰撞目标SA-L1触觉显示器在NDRT上产生的主观工作量较小。这些发现和定性问卷调查表明，SA-L1显示的简单性需要较少的心理资源，这允许参与者更好地解释车辆自动化中的感知故障。我们提供干预性能（距离、最大强度、碰撞时间）、WM性能（注意力和WM干扰）、定性问卷调查（NASA-TLX和SART）、半结构化访谈中的主观问题以及Unity VR环境中的数据。