Cooperative Control and Active Interfaces for Vehicle Assitsance and Automation

Enabled by scientific, technological and societal progress, and pulled by human demands, more and more aspects of our life can be assisted or automated by technical artefacts. One example is the transportation domain, where in the sky commercial aircraft are flying highly automated most of the times and where on the roads a gradual revolution takes place towards assisted, highly automated or even fully automated cars and trucks. Automobiles and mobility are changing gradually towards intelligent vehicles embedded in an integrated, intelligent transportation system. On the one hand, assistance and automation can have benefits like higher safety, lower workload, or a special fascination of use. On the other hand, assistance and automation come with a couple of challenges especially regarding the interplay between the driver and the assistance/automation. Some of these challenges can be addressed with a close coupling of assistance/automation and the driver, which leads to a shared or cooperative control of the vehicle. An early example of cooperative control in a car is the Lane Keeping Assistant System LKAS, where the automation delivers about 80% of the force required to keep the vehicle on the road, while the driver has to provide the missing 20% and therefore stays in the loop. A combination of LKAS and ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control) leads to highly automated driving, one level of automation on the automation spectrum between manual and fully automated driving. A close coupling between automation and driver can be achieved with active interfaces, e.g. force feedback steering wheels like in the LKAS or active sidesticks. After a brief overview on active interface technology, a prototype system developed in the H-Mode project by NASA, DLR and TU-Munich, and first data gained in driving simulators will be described