Towards guidelines for transition of control

There is a trend in Advanced Driver Assistance systems towards increased automation. Current systems and near-future systems will not yet be able to deal with all different situations that can be encountered and therefore need to share control of the vehicle with the driver. To safely and comfortably share control, a method for the transition of control (from manual to automated driving and vice versa) needs to be developed. This involves answering research questions like ‘how should the system take over’, ‘how can the driver take back control’, ‘can the driver be regarded as a backup if the system fails’, etc. This paper concentrates on finding different parameters and settings that may influence the transition of control for a ‘virtual tow bar’ system that is being developed at TNO . This serves as a first step to finding more general guidelines for transition of control and to develop necessary procedures, models and tools to evaluate these guidelines. Results of a first simulator experiment are presented and discussed