Longtime Effects of Videoquality, Videocanvases and Displays on Situation Awareness during Teleoperation of Automated Vehicles

Due to the challenges of autonomous driving, for the near future, automated vehicles will not be able to drive in all conditions without any human intervention. The challenge arises when no human driver is inside the vehicle to resolve the challenging situation. One solution for this might be teleoperation, here a remote operator takes control over the car and resolves the situation from a distance. But teleoperation technology itself comes with certain challenges, one of them being creating a good situational awareness at the operator site based on the sensor data transmitted from the automated vehicle. To understand this challenge better, in this paper a five-week long-time study is conducted with the goal of measuring the impact of different displays, video-canvases and -streaming quality on situation awareness, workload and decision making. The objective results show a significant impact of video streaming quality on various factors of situation awareness. On the other hand the subjective results such as workload, immersion, usability and presence indicate that video streaming quality only has an impact in situations with high contrasts and over all scenes the impact of video quality on subjective satisfaction is not significant. Between the three display modes no significance regarding quality was found. However, the participants preferred the head mounted display over the other options even though the results indicate that the head mounted display is most sensitive to changes in video streaming quality.