Mediating the Interaction between Human and Automation during the Arbitration Processes in Cooperative Guidance and Control of Highly Automated Vehicles: Base concept and First Study

With increasingly automated vehicles, the cooperation between the automation and the human becomes crucial. In cooperative guidance and control (CGC) of highly automated vehicles the questions arise how authority, responsibility and control are distributed between driver and automation, how this distribution is obtained and how different states like abilities, availabilities and modes are communicated between driver and automation. If two independently thinking entities start planning and acting together, the emergence of conflicts is inevitable. These conflicts can be solved by applying the method of arbitration. Arbitration works with different modalities as well as on different planning levels. To handle the complex interdependencies in human-automation interaction in the guidance and control of highly automated vehicles, an “interaction mediator” was designed to incorporate a framework of modules, which in turn are designed to be easily extendable. These modules are the “Mode Selection and Arbitration Unit”, enabling a proper distribution of responsibility depending on present abilities and availabilities, the “Manoeuvre Selection and Arbitration Unit”, the “Trajectory Adaption and Arbitration Unit”, and the “Coupling Valve” where control commands depending on the distribution of responsibility and control are coupled to one common control command for the entire ego-vehicle.