Haptic Shared Control for Dissipating Phantom Traffic Jams

TL;DR

This study explores using haptic shared control in vehicles to effectively dissipate phantom traffic jams, maintaining safety and human involvement better than full automation or manual control.

Contribution

It demonstrates that haptic shared control can reduce phantom traffic jams and safety risks during automation failures, offering a balanced solution between manual and automated driving.

Findings

Haptic shared control outperforms manual control in dissipating traffic jams.

Haptic shared control reduces unsafe situations during automation failures.

Full automation is more effective but less safe than haptic shared control.

Abstract

Traffic jams occurring on highways cause increased travel time as well as increased fuel consumption and collisions. Traffic jams without a clear cause, such as an on-ramp or an accident, are called phantom traffic jams and are said to make up 50% of all traffic jams. They are the result of an unstable traffic flow caused by human driving behavior. Automating the longitudinal vehicle motion of only 5% of all cars in the flow can dissipate phantom traffic jams. However, driving automation introduces safety issues when human drivers need to take over the control from the automation. We investigated whether phantom traffic jams can be dissolved using haptic shared control. This keeps humans in the loop and thus bypasses the problem of humans' limited capacity to take over control, while benefiting from most advantages of automation. In an experiment with 24 participants in a driving simulator, we tested the effect of haptic shared control on the dynamics of traffic flow, and compared it with manual control and full automation. We also investigated the effect of two control types on participants' behavior during simulated silent automation failures. Results show that haptic shared control can help dissipating phantom traffic jams better than fully manual control but worse than full automation. We also found that haptic shared control reduces the occurrence of unsafe situations caused by silent automation failures compared to full automation. Our results suggest that haptic shared control can dissipate phantom traffic jams while preventing safety risks associated with full automation.