A Steering Experiment Towards Haptic Cooperative Maneuver Negotiation

This paper contributes to research investigating if the concept of shared control is extendable to higher levels of human-machine cooperation. For this purpose, an experiment is presented analyzing the guidance level in cooperation among humans to transfer these findings in future assistance system design. Within the experiment, pairs of participants were facing a virtual obstacle avoidance course. They had to decide cooperatively on the maneuvers to avoid the obstacles. The only interaction possibility between team members was via haptically coupled steering wheels. The teams were classified based on the decisiveness of their members. Afterwards the time to reach a cooperative decision was measured. The results show a significant link between the distribution of decisiveness in a team and the time to reach a cooperative decision in ambiguous situations. Furthermore, the experiment reveals a high ability of humans to cooperate on the guidance level in general. This motivates human-imitating design of future assistance systems on guidance level in human-machine cooperation with the intention of high user satisfaction and trust in these systems.