User and safety benefit evaluation on autonomous driving

Research Project, 2017 – 2019

The automated driving (AD) technology is on the verge of being introduced in our lives and is expected to bring great benefits. When it comes to safety on our roads, there is the necessity to evaluate the safety impact of such a new technology. This should to some extend already be addressed in the design phase on a technical but also a human factors level. The human is still an active participant in the traffic environment and will be still involved in the driving in the first automation levels.  As different levels of AD are being developed, there is a clear need to establish and validate methods to perform user evaluation and prospective safety benefit analysis – to evaluate AD effectiveness, trust, and acceptance in the design phase. The majority of current research on AD focuses on the technical implementation and engineering – this post-doc will focus on the driver and creates a bridge between engineering and human factors.

In detail, this post-doc will leverage on and extend projects already ongoing and/or currently under review within the Traffic Safety profile and the Field data collection and Accident avoidance and automated driving fields. Chalmers (via SAFER) is one of six universities in the large ongoing (€36 million) H2020 project L3Pilot. The L3Pilot project is an AD pilot study across Europe. Chalmers has a clear safety focus in the evaluation of AD.

This post-doc project extends the work in L3Pilot project and links it to other projects/research on AD. The focus is on the driver, facilitating analyses of user and AD system. Aspects of this facilitation include the incorporation of comfort zone boundaries in AD design, contributions to quantitative modeling of driver behavior (for use in safety evaluation), and the development of tools for analysis and evaluation. 

The post-doc will perform several between-department/researcher outreach activities, facilitating closer cross-departmental collaborations. There is also a steering committee that include several actors from the automotive industry.