Developing a Highly Automated Driving Scenario to Investigate User Intervention: When Things Go Wrong

Current levels of vehicle automation (i.e., SAE-L2) require users to be vigilant and to intervene when automated vehicles fail to perform appropriately. In this work, we developed a scenario for investigating how humans respond, in the absence of notifications for system failure. In order to develop better notifications to elicit user intervention, it is necessary to first understand how humans would intervene, even without the aid of in-vehicle notifications. We provide a description of how this is implemented in a driving simulator using Unity, a game engine. In addition, we report preliminary results. Overall, we found that participants were more aroused and cautious under conditions of low environment visibility, even though visibility had no bearing on the likelihood of vehicle automation to fail. We present recommendations for how the current scenario could be improved for subsequent research.