SYNOPSIS
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.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Amirhossein Ghasemi received a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in2005, an M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Amirkabir University in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kentucky in2012. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research projects are focused on modeling and control of shared paradigms wherein a group of humans are interacting with a group of intelligent robots.