Building Mental Models through Preview of Autopilot Behaviors

TL;DR

This paper introduces AutoPreview, a framework that allows humans to preview autopilot behaviors in vehicles, enhancing understanding and trust during initial interactions, demonstrated through simulation and user studies.

Contribution

We developed AutoPreview with a future prediction module to improve human understanding of autopilot behaviors before direct interaction.

Findings

AutoPreview helps users understand autopilot behavior better.

Users develop more accurate mental models with AutoPreview.

The framework improves trust and safety in human-vehicle collaboration.

Abstract

Effective human-vehicle collaboration requires an appropriate un-derstanding of vehicle behavior for safety and trust. Improvingon our prior work by adding a future prediction module, we in-troduce our framework, calledAutoPreview, to enable humans topreview autopilot behaviors prior to direct interaction with thevehicle. Previewing autopilot behavior can help to ensure smoothhuman-vehicle collaboration during the initial exploration stagewith the vehicle. To demonstrate its practicality, we conducted acase study on human-vehicle collaboration and built a prototypeof our framework with the CARLA simulator. Additionally, weconducted a between-subject control experiment (n=10) to studywhether ourAutoPreviewframework can provide a deeper under-standing of autopilot behavior compared to direct interaction. Ourresults suggest that theAutoPreviewframework does, in fact, helpusers understand autopilot behavior and develop appropriate men-tal models