Enabling quantitative analysis of situation awareness: system architecture for autonomous vehicle handover studies

A key research domain within self-driving vehicle technology is system safety. Current development efforts target Level 3 autonomy, where the vehicle controls both lateral and transversal motion of the dynamic driving task, while the driver is permitted to divert its attention, as long as s/he is able to react properly to a handover request. Situation awareness, describing the cognitive capabilities of the driver in that given instant, has become a key metric of a safe handover process. This paper proposes an experimental setup for handover studies using the CARLA driving simulator alongside the master console of the da Vinci Surgical System. This surgical master console offers a built-in display in a setup particularly suitable for the analysis of situation awareness, controllers and foot pedals. Steering wheel-like behavior of the arms was achieved using impedance control. The presented solution is open-source, and available at https://github.com/ABC-iRobotics/dvrk_carla.