Design and Evaluation of a Touch-Based Personalizable In-Vehicle User Interface

There is a trend of personalizable products at the same time as there is a substantial growth of functions in the automobile user interface. A research through design approach was used to explore the potential of a personalizable vehicle user interface to improve traffic safety as well as user experience by offering a product that is tailored to the user’s own needs and preferences. A prototype was evaluated by 20 participants with several methods: interviews, Computer System Usability Questionnaire, Microsoft product reaction cards, and driving simulator measures. The prototype was experienced positively (flexible, easy to use, and usable), few usability issues were found, no negative effects on driving performance were found, and it was assumed that it could improve traffic safety. All participants stated that they would want to use such a system in their own cars.     

Situation awareness assessment in critical driving situations at intersections by task and human error analysis

The rapid development of sensor and tracking technology enables deployment of new Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that support the driver not just on highways but in urban areas as well. Intersections particularly present critical traffic scenarios where almost 35% of accidents occur, partially due to the present lack of in‐depth research about human errors and their determinants. The first step in ergonomic design of ADAS is to identify the specific situations in which drivers require support. To contribute to identification of such spots, situation awareness of 20 drivers in four critical intersection scenarios was explored. The study was conducted in the fixed‐base driving simulator. The applied approach consisted of assessing drivers' expectations and mental workload and of comparing theoretically correct cognitive behavior to experimentally collected data. Intersection scenarios were divided into five segments, and for each segment a task analysis was made. The study has shown that the driving simulator environment can be successfully deployed to provoke and explore various driver errors. The results have revealed that, in scenarios in which information is objectively missing, the majority of errors happened because the drivers had inaccurate mental models of particular scenarios. To the contrary, in the complex scenario the major cause of accidents was information overload. Furthermore, the task analysis disclosed applicable areas of intersection assistance. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Development and application of an integrated traffic simulation and multi-driving simulators

Professional virtual reality experiment tools, including driving simulators and traffic simulators, have their strengths and weaknesses. The integration of the two simulators will enhance the ability of both traffic modeling and driving simulation and present a new area of applications. This paper develops, implements, and validates an experimental platform that integrated a traffic simulator with multiple driving simulators (TSMDS). As a connected multi-user framework that allows multiple drivers who are simultaneously handling many driving simulators, it not only allows driver behavior experiments to be more accurate, controlled, and versatile but also simulates special driving behavior or multi-vehicle interactions under more realistic traffic flow environments. To validate the performance of TSMDS, 27 drivers were recruited to attend the lane changing experiments at a recurring on-ramp bottleneck and left-turn experiments at a two-phase signalized intersection in Shanghai. Both experiments required several drivers to drive the TSMDS and fulfill several complicated lane changing/crossing behaviors through their interaction. The results show that both the participants’ response and lane changing/crossing data that were obtained from the experiment are consistent with the field observation, which confirms the validity of the integrated platform.     

Rectification of legibility distance in a driving simulator

Visual differences lead to differences in the legibility distances of traffic signs between driving simulators and real road environments. To ensure that the legibility distance in a simulator is similar to that in the real world, this study proposes a theoretical equation for predicting legibility distance and a simple algorithm for determining the magnifying power of a traffic sign for a display system in a simulator. Experiments of traffic sign recognition using a simulator were conducted under quasi-static and dynamic driving conditions. On-road tests were also carried out under quasi-static and dynamic driving conditions. Thirty healthy and non-disabled volunteers were recruited. The experimental results showed that the proposed theoretical equation for predicting legibility distance and the simple algorithm for determining the magnifying power of traffic signs reduced the difference in legibility distances between the simulator and real road environment under quasi-static and dynamic driving conditions.     

面向智能驾驶测试的仿真场景构建技术综述

随着汽车智能化程度的不断提高,智能汽车通过环境传感器与周边行驶环境的信息交互与互联更为密切,需应对的行驶环境状况也越来越复杂,包括行驶道路、周边交通和气象条件等诸多因素,具有较强的不确定性、难以重复、不可预测和不可穷尽。限于研发周期和成本、工况复杂多样性,特别是安全因素的考虑,传统的开放道路测试试验或基于封闭试验场的测试难以满足智能驾驶系统可靠性与鲁棒性的测试要求。因此,借助数字虚拟技术的仿真测试成为智能驾驶测试验证一种新的手段,仿真场景的构建作为模拟仿真的重要组成部分,是实现智能驾驶测试中大样本、极限边界小概率样本测试验证的关键技术,这对提升智能驾驶系统的压力和加速测评水平显得尤为重要。面向智能驾驶测试的仿真场景构建技术已成为当前汽车智能化新的研究课题和世界性的研究热点,作为一种新兴技术仍面临许多挑战。本文提出了面向智能驾驶测试的仿真场景构建方法,系统阐述了国内外研究工作的进展与现状,包括场景自动构建方法和交通仿真建模方法,重点分析一些值得深入研究的问题并围绕场景构建技术的发展趋势进行了讨论分析,最后介绍了团队相关研究在2020中国智能驾驶挑战赛仿真赛和世界智能驾驶挑战赛的仿真场景应用情况。     

Parametric-based path generation for automated vehicles at roundabouts

Urban environments are becoming more and more complex because several factors as consecutive crossroads or lanes changes. These scenarios demand specific infrastructures—i.e. roundabouts, for improving traffic flow compared with traditional intersections. A roundabout removes timeouts associated with traffic lights at crossroads and trajectory conflicts among drivers. However, it is a challenging scenario for both humans and automated vehicles. This work presents a path planning method for automated vehicle driving at roundabouts. The proposed system achieves a G¹ continuous path, minimizing curvature steps to increase smoothness, dividing the driving process in three stages: entrance maneuver, driving within the roundabout and exit maneuver. Parametric equations are generated to deal with automated roundabout driving. This approach allows a real time planning considering two-lane roundabouts, taking different exits. Tests in simulated environments and on our prototype platform—Cybercar—validate the system on real urban environments, showing the proper behavior of the system.     

A service creation environment based on scenarios

Scenarios are often constructed for illustrating example runs through reactive system. Scenarios that describe possible interactions between a system and its environment are widely used in requirement engineering, as a means for users to communicate their functional requirements. Various software development methods use scenarios to define user requirements, but often lack tool support. Existing tools are graphical editors rather than tool support for design. This paper presents a service creation environment for elicitation, integration, verification and validation of scenarios. A semi-formal language is defined for user oriented scenario representation, and a prototype tool implementing an algorithm that integrates them for formal specification generation. This specification is then used to automatically find and report inconsistencies in the scenarios.     

Use of a fixed-base driving simulator to evaluate the effects of experience and PC-based risk awareness training on drivers' decisions

Driver education classes were once seen as a remedy for young drivers' overinvolvement in crashes, but research results from the early 1970s were disappointing. Few changes in the content or methods of instruction occurred until recently, but this could change rapidly. Personal computers (PCs) can now present videos or photorealistic simulations of risky, cognitively demanding traffic scenarios that require quick responses without putting the participant at risk. As such programs proliferate, evaluating their effectiveness poses a major challenge. We report the use of a fixed-base driving simulator to study the effects of both experience on the road and PC-based risk awareness training on younger drivers' part-task simulator driving performance in risky traffic scenarios. We ran three groups of drivers on the simulator: one group first trained on the PC (younger, inexperienced drivers) and two groups who received no PC training (younger, inexperienced and experienced drivers). Overall, the younger, inexperienced drivers who were trained on a PC operated their vehicles in risky scenarios in ways that differed measurably from those of the untrained younger, inexperienced drivers and, more important, in ways that we believe would decrease their exposure to risk considering that, on average, their behavior was more similar to the behavior of the untrained, experienced drivers. More research is needed to demonstrate whether these findings apply on the open road to the larger population of younger drivers. However, at least initially, the research suggests that PC-based risk awareness training programs have the potential to reduce the high crash rate among younger, inexperienced drivers.     

Puzzle: A mobile application development environment using a jigsaw metaphor

ObjectiveCreate a visual mobile end user development framework, named Puzzle, which allows end users without IT background to create, modify and execute applications, and provides support for interaction with smart things, phone functions and web services.MethodsDesign of an intuitive visual metaphor and associated interaction techniques for supporting end user development in mobile devices with iterative empirical validation.ResultsOur results show that the jigsaw is an intuitive metaphor for development in a mobile environment and our interaction techniques required a limited cognitive effort to use and learn the framework. Integration of different modalities and usage of smart things was relevant for users.ConclusionPuzzle has addressed the main objective. The framework further contributes to the research on mobile end user development in order to create an incentive for users to go beyond consuming content and applications to start creating their own applications.PracticeUsage of a mobile end user development environment has the potential to create a shift from the conventional few-to-many distribution model of software to a many-to-many distribution model. Users will be able to create applications that fit their requirements and share their achievements with peers.ImplicationsThis study has indicated that the Puzzle visual environment has the potential to enable users to easily create applications and stimulate exploration of innovative scenarios through smartphones.     

Situated Computing: A Paradigm for the Mobile User-Interaction with Multimedia Sources

Today, users interact with computers in an explicit manner and the system's response is independent from their situations. Hence, it is difficult to integrate computers with working life as embedded tools, which can facilitate users to accomplish real world objectives easily. Situated computing is a new paradigm for mobile computer users based on their physical context and activities carried out as a part of their working business. It provides the mechanism to have a mobile computer as a utility to satisfy the user's real world requirements as well as an infrastructure for the situated interaction using applications. In this paper, we are presenting a metaphor called situation metaphor to model interaction between the user and mobile computers in order to achieve expectations of situated computing. A three-layered schema is followed in developing situation metaphor. We discuss extensively the theoretical foundation and framework for the situation metaphor, and followed by applications developed based on the framework.     

Classification of air traffic control scenarios using decision trees: insights from a field study in terminal approach radar environment

Air traffic controllers are responsible for the safe, expeditious and orderly flow of the air traffic. Their training relies heavily on the use of simulators that can represent various normal and emergency situations. Accurate classification of air traffic scenarios can provide assistance towards a better understanding of how controllers respond to the complexity of a traffic scenario. To this end, we conducted a field study using qualified air traffic controllers, who participated in simulator sessions of terminal radar approach control in a variety of scenarios. The aim of the study was twofold, firstly to explore how decision trees and classification rules can be used for realistic classification of air traffic scenarios and secondly to explore which factors reflect better operational complexity. We applied machine learning methods to the data and developed decision trees and classification rules for these scenarios. Results indicated that decision trees and classification rules are useful tools in accurately categorizing scenarios and that complexity requires a larger set of predictors beyond simple aircraft counts. The derived decision trees and classification rules performed well in prediction, stability and interpretability. Practical benefits can be derived in the areas of operations and system design in the context of air traffic flow and capacity management systems.     

Autonomic control and personalization of a wireless access network

As ICT services are becoming more ubiquitous and mobile and access technologies grow to be more heterogeneous and complex, we are witnessing the increasing importance of two related needs: (i) users need to be able to configure and personalize their services with minimal effort; (ii) operators desire to engineer and manage their networks easily and efficiently, limiting human agency as far as possible. We propose a possible solution to reach these goals. Our vision, developed in the so-called Simplicity project, is based on a personalization device, which, together with a brokerage framework, offers transparent service configuration and runtime adaptation, according to user preferences and computing/networking context conditions. The capabilities of this framework can be exploited: (i) on the user side, to personalize services, to improve the portability of services over heterogeneous terminals and devices, to adapt services to available networking and terminal technologies; (ii) on the network side, to give operators more powerful tools to define new solutions for distributed, technology-independent, self-organizing, autonomic networking systems. Such systems could be designed so as to be able to react autonomously to changing contexts and environments.In this paper, we first describe the main aspects of the Simplicity solution. We then want to show that our approach is indeed viable. To prove this point, we present an application which exploits the capabilities of the Simplicity system: a mechanism to drive mobile users towards the most appropriate point of access to the network, taking into account both user preferences and network context. We use simulation to evaluate the performance of this procedure in a specific case study, where the aim is to balance the load in an 802.11b access network scenario. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure when compared to a legacy scenario and to another solution from literature.To give ample proof of the feasibility of our solution, we also designed and implemented a real prototype. The prototype enables not only the load to be balanced among different 802.11 access points, but also network and application services to be differentiated as a function of user profiles and network load. The main aspects of this prototype are presented in this paper.     

Sentiment analysis of movie reviews: finding most important movie aspects using driving factors

The opinion conveyed by the user towards the movie can be understood by sentiment analysis of the movie review. In the current work we focus on finding the aspects of a movie review which direct its polarity the most. This is achieved using certain driving factors, which are scores given to the various movie aspects. Generally its found that aspects with high driving factors affect the review polarity the most.     

Real-time energy optimization of HEVs under-connected environment: a benchmark problem and receding horizon-based solution

In this paper, we propose a benchmark problem for the challengers aiming to energy efficiency control of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) on a road with slope. Moreover, it is assumed that the targeted HEVs are in the connected environment with the obtainment of real-time information of vehicle-to-everything (V2X), including geographic information, vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I) information and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) information. The provided simulator consists of an industriallevel HEV model and a traffic scenario database obtained through a commercial traffic simulator, where the running route is generated based on real-world data with slope and intersection position. The benchmark problem to be solved is the HEVs powertrain control using traffic information to fulfill fuel economy improvement while satisfying the constraints of driving safety and travel time. To show the HEV powertrain characteristics, a case study is given with the speed planning and energy management strategy.     

MulTiSIM: An object-based distributed framework for mission simulation

The MulTiSIM object-based framework for implementing real time simulations is described. This can be used to create a world of interacting objects, distributed over a heterogeneous processing network. Communication between objects is handled by the framework in such a way that the operation of the objects is unaffected by changes to their distribution. A prototype of this framework has been implemented in Ada, augmented by support for object-oriented constructs. This has been used as the foundation for a helicopter mission simulator, operating in real time, some of whose features are also described.     

A formal framework for scenario development in support of environmental decision-making

Scenarios are possible future states of the world that represent alternative plausible conditions under different assumptions. Often, scenarios are developed in a context relevant to stakeholders involved in their applications since the evaluation of scenario outcomes and implications can enhance decision-making activities. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of scenario development and proposes a formal approach to scenario development in environmental decision-making. The discussion of current issues in scenario studies includes advantages and obstacles in utilizing a formal scenario development framework, and the different forms of uncertainty inherent in scenario development, as well as how they should be treated. An appendix for common scenario terminology has been attached for clarity. Major recommendations for future research in this area include proper consideration of uncertainty in scenario studies in particular in relation to stakeholder relevant information, construction of scenarios that are more diverse in nature, and sharing of information and resources among the scenario development research community.     

Modeling and simulating motions of human bodies in a futuristic distributed tele-immersive collaboration system for synthesizing transient input traffic

In this paper we model human body as a discrete-event system that enables applying discrete-event simulation (DES) to forward kinematics of stochastic and deterministic motions of a human body. Human gait cycles for walking and running are examples of the latter. Fast and flexible DES is made possible by linear interpolation for both motion types. It gives close approximation to finite Fourier series that model natural gait cycles. We use the simulator as the building block in simulating a futuristic tele-immersive collaboration system with arbitrary multi-actor collaboration scenario from remote locations. The silhouette area from the visualization of simulated moving human bodies is the main feature in synthesizing transient traffic that would result from such collaboration system. It will be useful as the input traffic for DES of arbitrary networks in future work. We demonstrate how to apply the simulation framework to simulate a scenario of collaborative dancing and singing that involves four performers with both motion types from two different places. Through the scenario we also show how the simulator works as a novel transient-traffic generator.     

自动驾驶交叉路口测试场景建模及验证方法

自动驾驶汽车在缓解交通拥堵和消除交通事故方面发挥着重要作用.为了保证自动驾驶系统的安全性和可靠性,在自动驾驶汽车部署到公共道路之前,必须进行全面的测试.现有的测试场景数据大多来源于交通事故和交通违法场景,而且自动驾驶系统最基本的安全需求就是遵守交通法规,这充分体现了自动驾驶汽车遵守交通规则的重要性.然而,目前严重缺少针对交通法规构建的自动驾驶测试场景.因此,本文从交通法规出发,根据自动驾驶系统安全需求,提出交叉路口测试场景的Petri网建模及形式化验证方法.首先,依据自动驾驶测试场景对交规进行分类,提取适合自动驾驶汽车的文本交规,并进行半形式化表征.其次,以覆盖道路交通安全法规以及测试场景功能测试规程为目标,融合交叉路口场景要素的交互行为,合理选择并组合测试场景要素,布设交叉路口测试场景.然后,基于交规的测试场景被建模为一个Petri网,其中,库所描述自动驾驶汽车的状态,变迁表示状态的触发条件,并选择时钟约束规范语言（CCSL）作为中间语义语言,将Petri网转换为一个可进行形式化验证的中间语义模型,提出具体的转换方法.最后,通过Tina软件分析验证交规场景模型的活性、有界性和可达性,结果表明所建模型的正确性,并基于SMT的分析工具MyCCSL来分析CCSL约束,采用LTL公式以形式化方法验证交规场景模型的一致性.     

The Effects of Vibration Patterns of Take-Over Request and Non-Driving Tasks on Taking-Over Control of Automated Vehicles

Automated vehicles offer the possibility of significantly increasing traffic safety, mobility, and driver comfort, and reducing congestion and fuel emissions. Current automation technology, however, remains imperfect, and in certain situations, automation will still require the driver to suspend non-driving tasks and take back control of the automated vehicle in a limited period of time. During automated driving, drivers engaged in non-driving tasks (e.g., reading, taking a nap) may not perceive the visual or auditory take-over request in a timely nor accurate manner. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the potential of tactile warning further. This study investigates the effects of vibration patterns of take-over requests (six vibration patterns with different orders of the vibration location) and various realistic non-driving tasks (six non-driving tasks: reading, typing, watching videos, playing games, taking a nap, and monitoring the driving scenario on the driving simulator) on driver take-over behavior, and driver trust and acceptance of automated vehicles. Across all non-driving tasks, the fastest response time was observed with Vibration Pattern 5 (order of the vibration location: back–back–seat–seat). The shortest response time and largest minimum time-to-collision (TTC) also were observed when drivers took back control of the vehicle after monitoring the driving scenario. No interaction effects between vibration patterns and non-driving tasks were observed. Potential applications of the results of designing take-over requests in automated vehicles are discussed.