Teleoperation emerged as a promising fallback for situations beyond the capabilities of automated vehicles. Nevertheless, teleoperation still faces challenges, such as reduced situational awareness. Since situational awareness is primarily built through the remote operator’s visual perception, the graphical user interface (GUI) design is critical. In addition to video feed, supplemental informational elements are crucial—not only for the predominantly studied remote driving, but also for emerging desk-based remote assistance concepts. This work develops a GUI for different teleoperation concepts by identifying key informational elements during the teleoperation process through expert interviews (N = 9). Following this, a static and dynamic GUI prototype was developed and evaluated in a click dummy study (N = 36). Thereby, the dynamic GUI adapts the number of displayed elements according to the teleoperation phase. Results show that both GUIs achieve good system usability scale (SUS) ratings, with the dynamic GUI significantly outperforming the static version in both usability and task completion time. However, the results might be attributable to a learning effect due to the lack of randomization. The user experience questionnaire (UEQ) score shows potential for improvement. To enhance the user experience, the GUI should be evaluated in a follow-up study that includes interaction with a real vehicle.
18 March 2019 in Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces
Cooperation between road users based on V2X communication has the potential to make road traffic safer and more efficient. The exchange of information enables the cooperative orchestration of critical traffic situations, such as truck overtaking maneuvers on freeways. With the benefit of such a system, questions arise concerning system failure or the abrupt and unexpected behavior of road users. A human-machine interface (HMI) organizes and negotiates the cooperation between drivers and maintains smooth interaction, trust, and system acceptance, even in the case of a possible system failure. A study was conducted with 30 truck drivers on a dynamic truck driving simulator to analyze the negotiation of cooperation requests and the reaction of truck drivers to potential system failures. The results show that an automated cooperation request does not translate into a significantly higher cooperation success rate. System failures in cooperative truck passing maneuvers are not considered critical by truck drivers in this simulated environment. The next step in the development process is to investigate how the success rate of truck overtaking maneuvers on freeways can be further increased as well as the implementation of the system in a real vehicle to investigate the reaction behavior of truck drivers in case of system failures in a real environment.