Driver Engagement/Status Monitoring Technologies for Vehicle Automation Applications

With the introduction of Level 2 (L2) vehicle automation technologies, a core challenge facing drivers is to remain engaged in the driving task and aware of the vehicle environment despite not playing an immediate role in the low level driving control loop. To overcome this challenge, SoarTech and its partners, UMTRI and Delphi Automotive, propose to develop DAISY, an innovative vehicle sub-system that maintains internal and external situation awareness and is able to the engage the driver in order to maintain safe L2 driving. Rather than removing the driver from the vehicle control loop, DAISY elevates the driver’s involvement to a high-level, supervisory control loop. DAISY leverages two core innovations: computational situation awareness (CSA), which estimates the driver’s engagement and complements the driver’s awareness of the vehicle state, and smart interaction (SI), which provides a natural, multi-modal mechanism for interacting with the user to share situation awareness and engage the user in the driving task. These innovations—CSA and SI—provide a powerful means of maintaining driver awareness without additional workload in order to afford safe, enjoyable L2 automation.