Safer secondary tasks in partially self-driving vehicles
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Industrial design engineering (MPDES), MSc
Publicerad
2022
Författare
Song, Chenglin
An, Ran
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
This Master Thesis was conducted at the Industrial Design Engineering program at
Chalmers University of Technology in collaboration with Autoliv Sverige AB.
Self-driving cars from Level 1 to Level 3 that are currently ready to be put into the
market, the proportion of time that the system controls the car gradually increases. In
the future, higher-level autonomous driving technology can further reduce the
distraction of perception factors, freeing people's hands to do other things, such as
checking emails, watching videos, and reading. We believe that there is a possibility
of a screen on the steering wheel of the car to perform secondary tasks.
The aim was to come up with conceptual graphical user interface design alternatives
for the touch screen control that could provide safer secondary tasks during SAE L3
automation. Academic research in related fields, user study and benchmarking were
performed before designing. The deliverables were two concepts for steering wheel
screens in different directions, including concept sketches and high-fidelity
prototypes of the user interfaces for Gmail and Youtube respectively of the two
concepts.
Concept I uses a mobile phone as a screen mounted on the steering wheel to
present information and provide control functions. The phone could be connected
with the vehicle system to display the user interface through the center screen. In
addition the user can use a stick and a voice assistance physical button to control
the center screen for secondary tasks. Concept II integrates a touchpad screen on
the right-hand side of the steering wheel as a small display and controller for the
central display. The screen can switch between a display and a touchpad when
performing secondary tasks.
A final user testing was performed after building the high-fidelity prototypes. The test
results show that the proposed concepts can meet the project objectives to a certain
extent, and further professional testing is needed. This thesis provides a feasible
scheme for level 3 autonomous vehicles to perform secondary tasks, and open up
new possibilities for level 3 and other autonomous vehicles to perform secondary
tasks.