Determining Infrastructure- and Traffic Factors that Increase the Perceived Complexity of Driving Situations

Should I take over? Does system knowledge help drivers in making take-over decisions while driving a partially automated car?

Partially automated car systems are expected to soon become available to the public. However, in order for any of the potential benefits of automated driving to arise, the driver and car need to establish effective, efficient and satisfactory interactions. Otherwise, the driver may rely too much on the automated car system, leading to dangerous...

Intelligent autonomous vehicles with an extendable knowledge base under meaningful human control

Intelligent robotic autonomous systems (unmanned aerial/ground/surface/underwater vehicles) are attractive for military application to relieve humans from tedious or dangerous tasks. These systems require awareness of the environment and their own performance to reach a mission goal. This awareness enables them to adapt their operations to...

The effect of see-through truck on driver monitoring patterns and responses to critical events in truck platooning

Automated platooning of trucks has its beneficial effects on energy saving and traffic flow efficiency. The vehicles in a platoon, however, need to maintain an extremely short headway to achieve these goals, which will result in a heavily blocked front view for the driver in a following truck. Monitoring surrounding traffic environment and...

Highly sensitive piezo particulate-polymer foam composites for robotic skin application

Tri-phase PZT-porous polyurethane (PU) composites are investigated with the aim of developing conformable, highly sensitive tactile sensors for application in Human-Machine Interactions. The main goal is to reduce the dielectric constant of the polymer matrix, and improve flexibility of traditional diphase piezo-composites, consisting of ceramic...

Combining situated Cognitive Engineering with a novel testing method in a case study comparing two infusion pump interfaces

We validated the usability of a new infusion pump interface designed with a situated Cognitive Engineering approach by comparing it to a reference interface using a novel testing method employing repeated measurements and process measures, in addition to traditional outcome measures. The sample consisted of 25 nurses who performed eight critical...

Tactile Cuing to Augment Multisensory Human-Machine Interaction

Tactile displays promise to improve the information-processing capacity of operators, especially when used in conjunction with visual and auditory displays. In this article, we describe current applications and future directions in tactile cuing. © 2015 by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved.

Using process-oriented interfaces for solving the automation paradox in highly automated navy vessels

This paper describes a coherent engineering method for developing high level human machine interaction within a highly automated environment consisting of sensors, actuators, automatic situation assessors and planning devices. Our approach combines ideas from cognitive work analysis, cognitive engineering, ontology engineering, and task-based...

Child-Robot Interaction in the Wild: Field Testing Activities of the ALIZ-E Project

A field study was conducted in which CRI activities developed by the ALIZ-E project were tested with the project's primary user group: children with diabetes. This field study resulted in new insights in the modalities and roles a robot aimed at CRI in a healthcare setting might utilise, while in addition (re-)assessed some practises and...

The NAO goes to camp

ALIZ-E is a Europe-wide project focusing on long-term child-robot interaction, specifically as a means of educating diabetic children on their condition. This video showcases a recent field study at "SugarKidsClub", a camp devoted to helping 7-12 year-olds handle type-1 diabetes. A wide range of CRI activities developed by ALIZ-E were employed,...

Taking turns in flying with a virtual wingman

In this study we investigate miscommunications in interactions between human pilots and a virtual wingman, represented by our virtual agent Ashley. We made an inventory of the type of problems that occur in such interactions using recordings of Ashley in flight briefings with pilots and designed a perception experiment to find evidence of human...

Error-related EEG patterns during tactile human-machine interaction

Recently, the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has been extended from active control to passive detection of cognitive user states. These passive BCI systems can be especially useful for automatic error detection in human-machine systems by recording EEG potentials related to human error processing. Up to now, these so-called error...