S(C)ENTINEL: monitoring automated vehicles with olfactory reliability displays

Abstract

Overreliance in technology is safety-critical and it is assumed that this could have been a main cause of severe accidents with automated vehicles. To ease the complex task of permanently monitoring vehicle behavior in the driving environment, researchers have proposed to implement reliability/uncertainty displays. Such displays allow to estimate whether or not an upcoming intervention is likely. However, presenting uncertainty just adds more visual workload on drivers, who might also be engaged in secondary tasks. We suggest to use olfactory displays as a potential solution to communicate system uncertainty and conducted a user study (N=25) in a high-fidelity driving simulator. Results of the experiment (conditions: no reliability display, purely visual reliability display, and visual-olfactory reliability display) comping both objective (task performance) and subjective (technology acceptance model, trust scales, semi-structured interviews) measures suggest that olfactory notifications could become a valuable extension for calibrating trust in automated vehicles.