Estimating Situational Awareness for the Safe Transfer of Control

The AWARE2ALL project addresses a critical safety challenge in automated driving: the transition from automation to driver control. This project seeks to assess and enhance the driver’s situational awareness during these transitions. It focuses on determining whether the driver is fully aware of their environment, including other traffic participants crucial to the driving task.

AWARE2ALL concentrates on the first level of situational awareness, specifically the perception layer, which involves assessing whether the driver has perceived surrounding vehicles. This is done by tracking the driver’s gaze in various regions around the vehicle.

The project’s approach involves attentional buffers linked to different regions around the vehicle. When the driver’s gaze is directed toward an object, the related buffer increases, while others decrease. When all buffers reach a certain minimum value, the driver is considered to have sufficient situational awareness. However, if a buffer reaches zero, the driver is believed to be unaware of the situation in that region and needs to look again to regain awareness.

By estimating the driver’s situational awareness and potentially visualizing it on a Human-Machine Interface (HMI), the AWARE2ALL project aims to enhance the safety of control transitions and reduce the risk of collisions resulting from driver inattention.

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