A "Collaborative" Approach Could Strike a Safe, Comfortable Balance for Autonomous Vehicles

Researchers from EPFL, working with Japanese steering system specialist JTEKT Corporation, have come up with an autonomous vehicle control system designed to improve safety and efficiency — by having the driver and the vehicle collaborate on the task of steering, rather than take turns.

"Current vehicles on the market are either manual or automated, and there is no clear way of making their control a truly shared experience," explains lab head Jürg Schiffmann of the problem his team sought to solve. "This is dangerous, because it tends to lead to driver over-reliance on automation."

"This research was based on the idea that automation systems should adapt to human drivers, and not vice versa," adds first author Tomohiro Nakade. "A vehicle must be open to negotiation with a human driver, just as a horseback rider conveys his or her intention to the horse through the reins."

A traditional autonomous vehicle system takes full control over the vehicle's steering, but requires that the driver is available to take back that control at a moment's notice should the system run into a problem — preferably before the car runs into something else. But that's not easy: "In automation in general, when humans are just monitoring a system but not actively involved, they lose the ability to react," explains JTEKT research and development manager Robert Fuchs. "That’s why we wanted to actively improve driver engagement through automation."

The resulting system is designed to be collaborative, though it does not always operate that way. When running, it can control the vehicle's steering much like existing autonomous vehicle systems — but is capable of incorporating user input, reacting to the steering wheel's operation as an additional factor in the direction it should go rather than a command to entirely disable the system and switch to wholly manual control. Likewise, if the system detects a threat — such as an impending collision — it can switch from collaborative operation to competitive operation.

In testing, using both simulation and real-world vehicle operation, the collaborative steering system showed "significant potential" to improve comfort and reduce the effort involved in operating the car while also boosting safety — though the researchers admit that the proof-of-concept design requires additional fine-tuning and customization in order to deliver a "comfortable and consistent" feel.

The team's work has been published in the journal Communications Engineering under open-access terms.