Title: Toward Seamless Human-Automation Handovers - An Adaptive Haptic Shared Steering Control for Ground Vehicles

Speaker: Dr. Amirhossein Ghasemi

Date: Friday, October 29, 2021

Human-automation teaming (HAT) is gaining importance in applications with autonomous vehicles because of its promise to improve performance, reduce the cost of operating and designing platforms, and increase adaptability to new situations. However, adding automation may sometimes have unintended consequences and increase rather than reduce---problems for a human operator, especially when faults occur. Given the fact that both humans and automation systems are subject to misses, faults, or errors, to ensure the HAT performance in the unanticipated conditions, it is critical to address the hand-off problem -- how to transition control between a human driver and automation system. Current solutions for control transfer in semi-automated ground vehicles face issues such as protracted transfer time, misinterpretations, or misappropriations of responsibility, and incomplete or inaccurate understandings of the vehicle and/or environment state. Transitions involving such issues are often bumpy and are implicated in compromises to safety. In this talk, I discuss our recent studies in designing and testing adaptive haptic shared control paradigm to control the steering of semi-automated ground vehicles.