An Experimental Study on Secondary Activity Evaluation Method During Automated Driving

Abstract

We tried to quantify the work effort of secondary activities (SA), carried out during automated driving, to predict the takeover time from the metric. Participants were asked to continuously perform a surrogate reference task (SuRT) on a hand-held device (smartphone), or on a fixed display, during automated driving, and to take over immediately after a request signal was presented. In parallel with the SuRT, they were also required to press a button at hand when they detected visual or tactile stimuli (detection response task: DRT). DRT response time is considered to vary according to the degree of effort associated with the SA. As a result, the takeover time for the hand-held device was longer than that for the fixed display. However, it was difficult to clearly confirm this tendency from the DRT response times obtained. It was suggested that there are restrictions to the types of tasks to which DRT can be applied.