Haptic Steering Wheel for Enhanced Driving: an Assessment in Terms of Safety and User Experience

In recent years, several achievements have been made towards the future of automated vehicles. Yet, automated driving functionalities are still limited, with the human driver being the ultimate fallback in any current system. However, the fact that humans have a completely different role (i.e., supervisors instead of drivers) is a challenge in many cases, because of the well-known out-of-the-loop problems [4] [5] [2]. Hence, the shared control strategy is a promising solution for future automated driving systems. In shared control, automation provides adaptive assistance to the driver, who is kept inside the control loop rather than being treated as a perturbation or a fallback for the system [1]. As part of improving the interaction between driver and automation, a haptic steering wheel has been designed that assists the driver in two different ways: a) it assists the driver in maintaining the vehicle in lane and performing critical evasive maneuvers, and 2) it serves as a new communication channel using haptic icons to provide information to the driver. The motivation of this research is to keep elderly motorists capable of driving safely, as they, in addition to carrying all the drawbacks of human drivers, also have reduced cognitive abilities and require higher levels of support.