Experimental Comparison of Direct and Indirect Haptic Aids in Support of Obstacle Avoidance for Remotely Piloted Vehicles

The sense of telepresence is known to be essential in teleoperation environments, where the operator is physically separated from the vehicle. Usually only a visual feedback is provided, but it has been shown that by extending the visual interface with haptic feedback, that is complementing the visual information through the sense of touch, the teleoperator has a better perception of information from the remote environment and its constraints. This paper focuses on a novel concept of haptic cueing for an airborne obstacle avoidance task; the novel cueing algorithm was designed to appear ＂natural＂ to the operator, and to improve the human-machine interface without directly acting on the actual aircraft commands. Two different haptic aiding concepts for obstacle avoidance support are presented： an existing and widely used system, belonging to what we called the Direct Haptic Aid （DItA） approach class, and a novel one based on the Indirect Haptic Aid （IHA） approach class. Tests with human operators show that a net improvement in terms of performance （i.e., the number of collisions） is provided by employing the 1HA haptic cue as compared to both the DHA haptic cue and/or the visual cues only. The results clearly show that the IHA philosophy is a valid alternative to the other commonly used approaches, which fall in the DHA category.

Performance evaluation framework of Wyoming connected vehicle pilot deployment program: summary of Phase 2 pre-deployment efforts and lessons learned

Purpose–This paper aims to present a summary of the performance measurement and evaluation plan of the Wyoming connected vehicle(CV)Pilot Deployment Program(WYDOT Pilot).Design/methodology/approach–This paper identified 21 specific performance measures as well as approaches to measure the benefits of the WYDOT Pilot.An overview of the expected challenges that might introduce confounding factors to the evaluation effort was outlined in the performance management plan to guide the collection of system performance data.Findings–This paper presented the data collection approaches and analytical methods that have been established for the real-life deployment of the WYDOT CV applications.Five methodologies for assessing 21 specific performance measures contained within eight performance categories for the operational and safety-related aspects.Analyses were conducted on data collected during the baseline period,and pre-deployment conditions were established for 1 performance measures.Additionally,microsimulation modeling was recommended to aid in evaluating the mobility and safety benefits of the WYDOT CV system,particularly when evaluating system performance under various CV penetration rates and/or CV strategies.Practical implications–The proposed performance evaluation framework can guide other researchers and practitioners identifying the best performance measures and evaluation methodologies when conducting similar research activities.Originality/value–To the best of the authors’knowledge,this is thefirst research that develops performance measures and evaluation plan for low-volume rural freeway CV system under adverse weather conditions.This paper raised some early insights into how CV technology might achieve the goal of improving safety and mobility and has the potential to guide similar research activities conducted by other agencies.