Delft Haptics Lab

The power of haptic guidance

Abstract

With haptic guidance drivers obtain information through force feedback on, for example, the steering wheel. This has been shown to result in improved primary task performance with reduced control activity. Largely unknown, still, is how much information content haptic guidance contains since haptic guidance systems are usually tested with full availability of the visual driving scene. The goal of this research is to gather empirical data to investigate the capability of haptic guidance to present essential steering control information to drivers during curve negotiation.

Previous research on visual perception during driving identified a far and near visual field of view for providing drivers with essential control information. We hypothesized that haptic guidance would be able to fully compensate for the absence of this essential visual control information. Sixteen drivers participated in a fixed-base driving simulator experiment to test this hypotheses. With occlusion visual information was removed from the visual scene above 7.54° below the true horizon for the near visual condition or beneath 1.68° below the true horizon for the far visual condition. Results show that haptic guidance is capable of effectively replacing the loss of near visual control information and partially replacing the loss of far visual control information.