The accumulation within the cars cockpit of assistance systems interacting with the driver via various modalities (visual, manual, tactile, sound, haptic…) jointly with the increase in the complexity of these systems (going from information to automatic driving) raises new problems of cooperation between the driver and the vehicle. Ensuring good safety conditions supposes to focus particularly on the compatibility of these systems as a whole with the vehicle guiding task, especially in terms of “comprehension of what the system does”, of “conscience of the activated modes” and of “capacity of attention and treatment” (situation awareness, workload) which they are likely to require. This is especially true during the transition phases (manual towards automatic and conversely).
These problems were particularly highlighted within the ANR-ABV project (2009-2013, coordinator : IFSTTAR) in which the majority of the partners of this consortium were involved. This project of automatic driving, partly at the origin of the CoCoVeA project, showed the need for integrating at the early stages of the system design the interactions with the driver dealing with task sharing, and degree of freedom, authority, level of automation, priorisation of information and management of the various systems. This approach supposes to be able to know the driver status at every moment, the current driving situation, the operating range of the various assistance systems and starting from these data, to make a decision concerning the activation or not of one or the other system and the modulation of its degree of action.
The consortium brings all the skills necessary for the realization of this multidisciplinary project. PSA PEUGEOT CITROËN, as a car manufacturer, is an expert as regards problems of integration and evaluation of embedded systems. CONTINENTAL AUTOMOTIVE and VALEO have an important knowledge in design and development of these systems. LAMIH is an expert as regards human-machine cooperation and has an important experience in the prototyping and evaluation of driver assistance systems in simulator. SPIROPS is specialized in artificial intelligence and decision-making processes. INRIA is recognized for its work on driver assistance systems, particularly in automatic driving. UNICAEN-COMETE and AKKA have a large experience in the analysis of the state and the behavior of the driver through studies carried out in particular on the assessment of vigilance. AKKA has also an important experience in the ergonomic study of the aircraft cockpits (human factors certification) and in particular in the management of emergency situations. This competence will make it possible to widen the field of research and to capitalize on the two fields: aeronautics and car.
In addition, the partners have state-of-the-art experimental platforms which will be made available for the project, in particular the dynamic simulator of LAMIH as well as the laboratory vehicle of AKKA-INRIA.
Using these complementary competences and means, the consortium proposes:
- To develop a cooperative architecture between driver and assistance system for automatic driving (vehicle control sharing through haptics).
- To develop a prototype for the control and coordination of the systems embedded in the cockpit.
- To integrate these systems on several demonstrators in both driving simulator and real vehicle.
- To validate through an experiment the developed systems.