Andreas Riener

Workshop on Communication between Automated Vehicles and Vulnerable Road Users

The aim of this half-day workshop is to explore the topic of interaction between automated vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians or cyclists, in an interactive setting. The workshop is hands-on with no submission of position papers or slots for participant presentations. It aims at deriving knowledge about communication needs across various traffic scenarios resulting in metrics and methodologies for evaluating communication needs by having the participants go through a brief design and evaluation process in a two-step setting. The workshop results will be collected and preserved on a website hosted by the organisers post-workshop.

Evaluation of Driving Performance and User Experience of Different Types of Speedometer

Previously, the classical analog speedometer was the prevalent form of speed indication in cars. With the emergence of new, freely programmable, instrument clusters, its now possible to use any form of visualization to display driving speed. In a driving simulator study with n=17 subjects, we examined the impact of diverse speedometer variants on driving performance, gaze duration, and subjective ratings of user experience and workload. Initial results confirm diverse effects. The conventional speedometer resulted in the shortest eyes off-road times, but was rated worst with respect to UX (hedonic quality). The digital speedometer variant achieved polarizing results while the zoom speedometer performed very well in general. The bracket and linear versions of a speedometer were rated poor in most of the analyzed criteria compared to the alternatives.

Workshop on Designing Highly Automated Driving Systems as Radical Innovation

Automated driving systems (ADS), especially in higher levels of automation, seem to be the new focus of innovation regarding future mobility. Technological achievements of traveling automation open up new challenges for road traffic. Existing automotive research focuses on problem solving and observational approaches including users and their imagination of the future of mobility to analyze acceptance and user experience of incremental (step-wised improved) innovations. On the other hand, radical (something new, enabled by technology or meaning change) innovations extensively increase product quality leaping over incremental innovation. This workshop aims to challenge the current research approaches to automated driving against trying to improve sitting in a horse carriage and discuss how we can design radical innovations for ADS beyond the horse carriage. Within this interactive workshop, we will utilize a design thinking approach to refocus on underlying problems that ADSs originally aim to solve and generate ideas for radical innovations.

Let Me Finish before I Take Over: Towards Attention Aware Device Integration in Highly Automated Vehicles

A major promise of automated vehicles is to render it possible for drivers to engage in nondriving related tasks, a setting where the execution pattern will switch from concurrent to sequential multitasking. To allow drivers to safely and efficiently switch between multiple activities (including vehicle control in case of Take-Over situations), we postulate that future vehicles should incorporate capabilities of attentive user interfaces, that precisely plan the timing of interruptions based on driver availability. We propose an attention aware system that issues Take-Over Requests (1) at emerging task boundaries and (2) directly on consumer devices such as smartphones or tablets. Results of a driving simulator study (N=18), where we evaluated objective, physiological, and subjective measurements, confirm our assumption: attention aware Take-Over Requests have the potential to reduce stress, increase Take-Over performance, and can further raise user acceptance/trust. Consequently, we emphasize to implement attentive user interfaces in future vehicles.

Do moral robots always fail? Investigating human attitudes towards ethical decisions of automated systems

Technological advances will soon make it possible for automated systems (such as vehicles or search and rescue drones) to take over tasks that have been performed by humans. Still, it will be humans that interact with these systems — relying on the system (s decisions) will require trust in the robot/machine and its algorithms. Trust research has a long history. One dimension of trust, ethical or morally acceptable decisions, has not received much attention so far. Humans are continuously faced with ethical decisions, reached based on a personal value system and intuition. In order for people to be able to trust a system, it must have widely accepted ethical capabilities. Although some studies indicate that people prefer utilitarian decisions in critical situations, e.g. when a decision requires to favor one person over another, this approach would violate laws and international human rights as individuals must not be ranked or classified by personal characteristics. One solution to this dilemma would be to make decisions by chance — but what about acceptance by system users? To find out if randomized decisions are accepted by humans in morally ambiguous situations, we conducted an online survey where subjects had to rate their personal attitudes toward decisions of moral algorithms in different scenarios. Our results (n=330) show that, despite slightly more respondents state preferring decisions based on ethical rules, randomization is perceived to be most just and morally right and thus may drive decisions in case other objective parameters equate.

Driving Hotzenplotz!: A Vehicle Interface that Fosters the Joy of Driving

Vehicle automation is expected to change users driving experience dramatically. Interactions with the car, like accelerating, braking, and overtaking will be inherited by technical systems. As a consequence, users basic psychological needs of feeling competent and autonomous will be restricted. This might reduce as well pleasure or fun of driving. In our video, we are presenting the vehicle interface Hotzenplotz, which combines the advantages of both manual and automated driving to foster the joy of driving. By the optional possibility for accelerating, braking, and overtaking, users feel stimulated, and significantly more competent and autonomous as compared to purely automated driving.

Interactive Demo: Rapid, Live Data Supported Prototyping with U.S.E.

Hands-on research involving multiple tools and high fidelity prototypes is very rewarding. However, preparation, execution and evaluation is slow and inefficient due to the lack of streamlined development & analysis environments. Therefore, we demonstrate the prototyping capabilities of User Studies Made Easy -- a software framework for multi-tool user studies. To do so, we showcase a simple dashboard HMI, which uses live data from a driving simulation and physiological assessment tools, with an emphasis on how little effort was needed to implement it. Additionally offering the opportunity to participate in a hackathon competition for a trust calibrating dashboard further fosters discussion about possible improvements to USE, as well as the topic of trust and acceptance in automation.