Take-over performance in evasive manoeuvres

Happee, Riender; Gold, Christian; Radlmayr, Jonas; Hergeth, Sebastian; Bengler, Klaus · 2017 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2017.04.017

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Summary

This study investigates driver performance during evasive maneuvers following take-over requests (TOR) in automated vehicles, specifically addressing the "after-effects" of automation on safety and control precision. The research was motivated by the need to design effective fallback procedures for SAE Level 3 automation, where drivers must resume control in complex scenarios. While previous research established that automation delays reaction times, there was limited evidence regarding the quality, dynamics, and safety margins of the resulting evasive maneuvers, such as lane changes to avoid obstacles. The researchers analyzed data from two prior simulator experiments involving 80 participants across five groups. The scenarios involved highway driving at 120 km/h where a blocked lane required an evasive maneuver. Conditions compared manual driving against automated driving with either cognitive distraction (n-back task, eyes on road) or visual distraction (SuRT task, eyes off road). The study evaluated surrogate safety metrics, primarily Time to Collision (TTC) and minimum obstacle clearance, alongside steering and braking dynamics. The authors refined TTC definitions, preferring a lane-position-based metric (TTCL) over a heading-based one (TTCH) for robustness, and utilized Extended TTC (ETTC) to account for acceleration. Results confirmed that prior automation use significantly delayed initial steering and braking interventions compared to manual driving. This delay resulted in lower minimum TTC values and necessitated stronger, more aggressive steering and braking actions to avoid collisions. Visual distraction during automated driving produced larger negative effects on TTC than cognitive distraction. However, despite the delayed onset and aggressive inputs, the precision of the maneuvers remained largely unaffected; drivers maintained similar clearance distances from obstacles, exhibited comparable overshoots into the target lane, and showed similar excursions toward the hard shoulder across all conditions. The study concludes that while automation degrades the timing of driver interventions, it does not necessarily compromise the spatial precision of evasive maneuvers. The findings validate the use of TTC and obstacle clearance as surrogate safety metrics in simulator studies but highlight the sensitivity of TTC to definition choices. The authors emphasize the need for real-world validation to confirm these simulator-based results and to assess systematic behavioral differences in naturalistic driving conditions.

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Topics

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• manual
• visual manual
• visual
• automation surprise
• takeover transitions
• temporal

Information type

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• Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data
• Methodological Resource: measurement protocol
• Theoretical Contribution: conceptual framework