Acting together by mutual control: Evaluation of a multimodal interaction concept for cooperative driving

This paper presents a study on the evaluation of a proposed interaction concept for cooperative driving in a lane-change scenario. First, cooperative driving is set into the context of human-machine cooperation. Second, for designing the system, the interaction between driver and car is established (based on mutual control), and the cooperation among different vehicles is elaborated. A timing sequence is presented for both. The corresponding multimodal user interface is introduced. The interface focuses on augmented reality via the contact analogue head-up display. During its design phase, certain mode aspects and design patterns are considered in order to improve the cooperation. Third, the implementation is outlined. Fourth, the evaluation is presented discussing the within-subjects experiment with 25 participants by means of three aspects: user interface quality, interaction timing and workload measurement, as a basis for user state inference. We obtained evidence that the proposed interaction concept improves cooperative behavior and increases safety. We furthermore verified a U-shaped relation between workload and performance by using a variety of different metrics. In a fifth step, future iterations are depicted.