Advice Provision in Teleoperation of Autonomous Vehicles

Teleoperation of autonomous vehicles has been gaining a lot of attention recently and is expected to play an important role in helping autonomous vehicles handle difficult situations which they cannot handle on their own. In such cases, a remote driver located in a teleoperation center can remotely drive the vehicle until the situation is resolved. However, teledriving is a challenging task and requires many cognitive resources from the teleoperator. Our goal is to assist the remote driver in some complex situations by giving the driver appropriate advice. The advice is displayed on the driver’s screen to help her make the right decision. To this end, we introduce the TeleOperator Advisor (TOA), an adaptive agent that provides assisting advice to a remote driver. We evaluate the TOA in a simulation-based setting in two scenarios: overtaking a slow vehicle and passing through a traffic light. Results indicate that our advice helps to reduce the cognitive load of the remote driver and improve driving performance.