Publication

The aim of this thesis was to tackle the areas of autonomous driving and haptics in a multimodal context. The level of autonomy was set to be applicable by the car industry within five years, but still be futuristic enough to develop unique and compatible solutions. The concepts were gathered around a scenario where the driver is travelling on the motorway without either feet on the pedals or hands on the wheel. However the driver will still have a responsibility to monitor the system and the road ahead. The aim of the haptic feedback has been to reduce the driver’s visual workload while monitoring the traffic situation in a motorway context. Driver trust, intuitiveness and user acceptance have also been considered during the thesis work. The authors started with a human centred approach and studied the communication between a driving school instructor and a student in order to draw parallels to how an autonomous system would communicate. Even though the human centred approach provided subjective values and needs, much can be learnt through this approach to autonomous driving and haptics in particular. To understand the different tasks in the autonomous driver’s environment the process had to be described in more detail. A general process flow was explored and mapped to support future work in the autonomous driving area. When enough knowledge about people’s attitude to autonomous cars and haptics had been gathered the authors started to brainstorm and benchmark ideas from the industry. By using concept scoring tools the haptic HMI solutions were evaluated objectively and it was concluded that haptics should be integrated: