Autonomous driving systems (ADS) have been widely tested in real-world
environments with operators who must monitor and intervene due to remaining
technical challenges. However, intervention methods that require operators to
take over control of the vehicle involve many drawbacks related to human
performance. ADS consist of recognition, decision, and control modules. The
latter two phases are dependent on the recognition phase, which still struggles
with tasks involving the prediction of human behavior, such as pedestrian risk
prediction. As an alternative to full automation of the recognition task,
cooperative recognition approaches utilize the human operator to assist the
automated system in performing challenging recognition tasks, using a
recognition assistance interface to realize human-machine cooperation. In this
study, we propose a recognition assistance interface for cooperative recognition
in order to achieve safer and more efficient driving through improved
human-automation cooperation. A simulator experiment with 18 participants is
conducted to evaluate our recognition assistance interface in comparison with a
conventional control intervention, in terms of driving safety, efficiency, and
usability. Recognition of pedestrian crossing intention is selected for the
cooperation task, and driving scenarios in which the automated system cannot
reliably recognize the crossing intentions of pedestrians at non-signalized
locations are selected as the driving scenario. Statistical analysis of our
experimental results reveals that the proposed recognition assistance interface
allowed more accurate operator intervention, was easier to use, and achieved
more stable vehicle control than the control intervention. We also found that
sharing the recognition information of the automated driving system with
operators could divide their attention, impairing intervention performance. Our
experimental results suggest that the unifying presentation of the system
recognition information and the operator’s manipulation target on the
touchscreen of the user interface addresses this problem.
