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Maria Fleischer KFV (Austria)
Maria Fleischer completed her master’s degree in Transport Planning at Newcastle University, England, with a focus on the environment. In her professional career, she has already gained a lot of experience in the field of project management and international cooperation. Furthermore, she has completed specialised training to qualify as a road safety auditor. Since 2021, she has been working in the research area of road safety at KFV, with a special focus on automated driving, driver assistance systems and implications for driver education. |
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Testing of L2 driving functions regarding their system functionality and human-machine interaction on rural roads As the automation of the driving task progresses, the human driver is gradually freed from the responsibility of actively controlling the vehicle's dynamic driving functions. This leads to the paradox that, despite our decreasing participation in the active performance of the driving task, we are exposed to ever higher competence requirements. This is particularly evident in partially automated driving at automation level 2 (SAE-L2 - according to the terminology of the American Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE, J6013). As the vehicle increasingly takes on the core aspects of the driving task, including longitudinal and lateral guidance, for longer durations and distances, the crucial question arises: How can this assistance be finely tuned to seamlessly involve the human in the supervisory role, without making them feel that the vehicle has taken over full control? This question is essential because the driver must maintain continuous vigilance, monitoring both the vehicle system and the environment in order to take over complete control of the vehicle when the system limits are reached. The vehicle drivers remain technically and legally fully responsible for the driving task and continue to serve the system as a safety-related fallback level. Even though there can be some positive safety effects of partially automated driving at automation level 2 (e.g., better/constant distance control, lane keeping), the risk factors mentioned above are more extensive and tend to lead to numerous safety-reducing challenges such as loss of routine, excessive demands, reduction of vigilance /fatiguing continuous monitoring, lack of situational awareness, as well as overconfidence or misuse of the systems. For this reason, a project was launched by the Austrian Road Safety Board (KFV) together with the Swiss Council for Accident Prevention (BFU) and the German Insurers Accident Research (UDV) to investigate safety critical situations of SAE-L2 vehicle functions on rural roads. The focus is on the evaluation of the functionality on rural roads as well as on the involvement of the driver in the driving task in the monitoring process of the L2 driving functions. |
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