Congratulation to Tomohiro Nakade
© 2023 EPFL LAMD
Tomohiro Nakade successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Haptics based collaborative steering control in automated driving environments" on August 22nd 2023.
Despite the recent rise of advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) functions, technical and legal challenges still bind the human driver to the driving task and further emphasize haptic design as a communication channel for collaboration between human driver and automation. This thesis contributes to the development of a comprehensive collaborative steering control framework that enables a consistent haptic design in situations where the driver and the automation share steering tasks. The critical concern is how to control automation to enable rich interaction with the human driver. This control framework, inspired by human-human haptic collaboration, relies on three major functions: interaction enables the driver and the automation to steer together, arbitration sets how the automation interacts with the driver, and inclusion allows the automation to adapt its trajectory by assimilating the driver intent.
The proposed framework has the potential to extend conventional ADAS or AD functions, which are operated typically in a discontinuous way, towards continuous shared operation, which results in a more consistent steering feel of the driver. Furthermore, this general framework is not limited to steering tasks, but can be applied to any other collaborative tasks between human and robot.
In collaboration with JTEKT Corporation