Driver intent interface and dynamic displays for active safety: an overview of selected recent studies

The primary goal of intelligent driver support systems (IDSS) is to provide effective warnings and alarms to the drivers to enhance safe driving. We will discuss multidisciplinary research activities focused on the design and evaluation of new types of intelligent driver support systems and their components. Systematic efforts to understand and characterize driver behavior and ethnography surrounding the task of driving are essential in the development of human-centric driver assistance systems. Novel instrumented vehicles are used for conducting experiments, where the rich contextual information about vehicle dynamics, surround and driver state are captured for careful, detailed ethnographic studies, as well as realistic data for developing algorithms to analyze multi sensory signals for active safety. We will also introduce a new type of visual display called "dynamic active display". These displays present visual information to the driver where driving view and safety-critical visual icons are presented to the driver in a manner that minimizes deviation of her gaze direction without adding to unnecessary visual clutter. In this paper, we present a brief overview of selected recent research studies focused on driver intent analysis and dynamic displays conducted in our laboratory.