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Studying Human Factors of Highly Automated Vehicles: Overview of the “User”-related results of the European Hi-Drive Project

Date and Time: Tuesday, July 11, 2023: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Natasha Merat 

Professor, Leader, Human Factors and Safety Group, Institute for Transportation Studies, University of Leeds
@NatashaMerat

Presentation Description

This poster provides an overview of the current European flagship project Hi-Drive, focusing on the methodologies used and some of the results of the "Users" sub-project.

The sub-project includes 23 partners from OEMs, Research Organisation, User Groups ane Suppliers, investigating User interactions with Automated Vehicles as part of four dedicated Workpackages. These include:

1. Studying User Acceptance, Awareness & Expectations of Automated Vehicles, via a series of dedicated user questionnaires; and a bespoke global survey assessing user expectations accross the length of the project (continuing from the work done in the L3Pilot project).

2. Assessing how user comfort is affected by AV driving style, and studying how motion sickness can be reduced in AVs.

3. Studying changes in driver state during highly automated driving; assessing the value of user monitoring systems, and their related HMIs

4. Investigating the interactions of other road users with automated vehicles, including how teleoperators, pedestrians, other vehicles and cyclists interact with these new forms of mobility in a shared space environment.

This poster provides an overview of the methodologies used for user evaluation and highlights some preliminary findindgs from the team.

Speaker Biography

Professor Merat is an experimental psychologist, leads the Human Factors and Safety Group, @ITS Leeds and is Director of Virtuocity@Leeds, a suite of linked, human-in-the-loop simulators. Her main research interests are in understanding the interaction of road users with new technologies, inlcuding driver distraction/inattention and impairment. She is an expert in the human factors implications of highly automated vehicles (AVs). She has been PI to key pojects on AVs, including AdaptIVe, CityMobil2, InterACT, HumanDrive, and L3PILOT. She currently leads the "Users" sub-project of Hi-Drive, which is studying user interaction with highly automated vehicles. Professor Merat is Chair of the Transportation Research Board sub-committee on Human Factors in Road Vehicle Automation; the European Chair of the trilateral (EU-US-Japan) Working Group on Human Factors of Automated Vehicles, and an advisory board member of over 15 organisations, including Veoneer Inc., National Highways, Centre for Connected and Automated Vehicles, AVIVA, and Chemnitz University’s Hybrid Societies research programme. She is currently leading an ISO Task Force on design guidelines for future Driver Monitoring Systems.

Presentation File