Human Factors the Focus on Second Day of Automated Vehicle Symposium

Keynote speaker Don Norman. AUVSI photo.

By Danielle Lucey



Speakers from the second day of AUVSI and the Transportation Research Board’s Automated Vehicle Symposium 2014 focused in on how people’s behaviors would play a key role in the adoption of autonomous vehicle technology. 



Keynote speaker Don Norman, director of the design lab at the University of California San Diego, said that while many believe human error is responsible for upwards of 90 percent of all accidents, his background in human factors leads him to believe otherwise. 



“If 5 percent of the accidents were human error, I’d believe it, but when it’s 95 percent, it means we’re being asked to do things we’re not good at,” he said. 



Norman said people excel at creative, imaginative and flexible tasks, while machines are good at consistency, and often with automation, humans are asked to take over at the exact moment they need automation the most. And he said this issue will be most profound with partial automation. 



“The hardest part of this transition is when we have partial automation, and that has been shown over and over and over again in aviation,” said Norman, who used to study that business. “People can not keep their attention on what the task is.”



Norman said he also is not a fan of the levels of automation that are popularly cited in the self-driving car community. 



“We think the whole believe of levels of automation is ill framed,” he said, speaking for the human factors community. “I can understand level zero, and I can understand level five, … but the ones in between? Here’s the problem with levels of automation. It’s engineering driven.”



To gain the perfect balance of human and machine interaction, Norman asked the audience to imagine riding a horse, and when a scenario is benign, a rider loosens the reins, but when the human overrides the horse, he tightens the reins. He imagined that a similar interface might work better than beeps and buzzes, which is how cars communicate information to people now. 



Automakers discussed their step-by-step approaches to adding autonomy to their systems, like GM. The company’s John P. Capp said human factors research has played a large part in their technology development. 



“It’s a step in the automated path,” he said, regarding the company’s Super Cruise system. “It allows you to take hands off the wheel, feet off the pedals, but you still have to be engaged and pay attention.”



The company studied how its passengers behave while in a moderately autonomous system and often they partake in unsafe behaviors that would distract them in case they had to take over. Capp said the solution could go one of two directions, either the company could wait to develop the perfect system or it could develop intuitive countermeasures. 



“This is a level of automation and functionality that we think we can bring to the marketplace this decade,” he said. “We’re not getting specific yet, but we’re getting closer.”



Google’s Chris Urmson said the company takes a very personal approach to testing the company’s self-driving car technologies, including asking 140 of its employees to use it as their commuter car. 



“What we found is they absolutely loved it,” he said. “The universal response was, ‘No, you can’t have it back.’”



Urmson said the company has spend the last year focusing on enabling mobility and freedom through automated driving and has decided to let the automaker space work on the human factors issue. 



He said Google has spent the last year or so focusing on teaching the car the implications of what an object might do. For instance, he showed videos where the car was able to interpret stop signs held up by construction workers and deployed on the sides of school buses. The car has also learned how to maneuver when a police or emergency vehicle is present. 



“A big challenge is behaving with other people on the road,” he said, though the car moved adeptly around cyclists making traffic gestures and maneuvered around them in accordance with California law. 



European Perspective



European project CityMobil2’s Dr. Adriano Alessandrini said the company has a unique approach to integrating its urban automated driving technology. The organization created a knowledge campaign so its European users would know how to behave around its vehicles.



The company has just released a new version of its vehicle, which is made by Ligiers. The VIPA II move to a new company was out of necessity, since the initial maker went bankrupt, said Alessandrini. He said six of the vehicles will be operational in Lausanne, Switzerland, by November. 



Dr. Angelos Amditis from the I-Sense Group discussed the European Commission-backed Adaptive program, which will address level one through four automation, with both drivers in and out of the loop in different scenarios. 



The project will research a park assistant app, constriction site maneuvering, city cruising, automated garage parking, supervised city control and city chauffeur scenarios. Currently, he said they are working on creating requirements and specifications for these functions. 



Anders Tylman-Mikiewicz of Volvo said the company is preparing its Drive Me project for the roads of Gothenburg, Sweden, by 2017. The $75 million project will have people operating vehicles during a typical commute in the city, mixed with real traffic. 



“You can only realize so much by trying technologies and solutions that you eventually start to fall in love with yourself, so you really have to expose people,” he said. 



Safety has traditionally been the major focus of the company, but Tylman-Mikiewicz also highlighted the growing importance of free time for drivers. He cited a 2012 study that said, for the first time, more than 50 percent of Americans felt like lack of time was more of an issue for them than lack of money. And automated vehicles could solve that issue. 



“What I especially love about autonomous driving is it gives freedom back to cars.”