Correct and faulty driver support from shared haptic control during evasive maneuvers

With shared control both driver and support system have control authority and as such exert control actions to maneuver the car. In haptic shared control, the support system acts through guiding forces on the same control interface with which the driver interacts with the vehicle. Previous research showed beneficial results when drivers are supported during lane keeping and curve negotiation. Haptic shared control can be used as an intermediary support system in between the opposites of manual and automatic control. In a fixed-base driving simulator experiment we tested a haptic shared control system during evasive maneuvers. Besides the expected benefits with a perfectly functioning system we also tested the capabilities of drivers to override the system in case of a malfunction. Results of the experiment show that for a time-to-contact (TTC) of 1.4s, haptic shared control reduced the hit rate with obstacles from 21.2% to 15.2%. Even though failure of the haptic support system at TTC=1.4s increased the hit rate to 64.7% (compared to 100% in case of full automation) time spent in the opposite lane was not significantly changed by the failure.