Effectiveness Assessment of Human-Machine Interface in Driver Assistance System

In the recent years, with the development of Driver Assistance System such as Lane Departure Warning System and Forward Collision Warning System, how to design more effective Human-Machine-Interface to provide warning information, gets more and more attention. The purpose of this study is to introduce a quantitative test method for effectiveness assessment of Human-Machine-Interface for Driver Assistance system (DAS) in a simulated driving environment, and to assess different kinds of Human-Machine-Interfaces by proposed test method. In this paper, a large number of driver volunteer experiments in different scenarios and test conditions based on a driving simulator linked with the Human-Machine-Interface have been done, to assess the effects of visual warning methods, auditory warning methods, tactile warning methods and any combination of these three methods. In the experiments, the graphic type and text type of the visual warning, the buzzer type and human-voice type of the auditory warning, and the tactile warning are regulated. With proposed test method, the driver’s reaction time and comprehension time (the time of understanding warning meaning) are assessed.