Driving Capability-Based Transition Strategy for Cooperative Driving: From Manual to Automatic

In open traffic environments, humans still have to remain in the control loop of vehicle due to the insufficient of the existing technologies and their high costs. For the realization of cooperation between the human and the automatic driving system, the determination of the time when automatic driving is necessary is very important. To avoid unnecessary intervention when the driver has the control authority of vehicle, a new driving capability-based transition strategy was proposed, which comprehensively considers the driver’s correction ability and the driving risk. The transition time from the human driver to the automatic driving system is determined by an unreliable domain (UD), whose boundary is modeled according to the driving data recorded by a driving simulator and statistically described by a log-normal distribution. Furthermore, an adaptive algorithm is designed to update the parameters of UD boundary online to make this strategy suitable for different drivers. This UD-based transition strategy is validated by several tests on the driving simulator. The bench test results show that the individual driving characteristic can be identified by the adaptive algorithm in time, the transition time determined by UD is more accurate, and sufficient time is reserved for the correction carried out by the automatic driving system.