Multimodal Priming of Drivers for a Cooperative Take-Over

Recent research has revealed the potential for using remaining capabilities of a driving automation in the form of information processing for driver support in take-over scenarios. As a next step, progressing technical development could enable support in form of partly active control leading to situations of cooperative shared control between automation and driver. To maximize performance in cooperative takeovers, drivers should be informed sufficiently about the automation's intent for the shared control phase. Priming a driver for an automated control action shares basic concepts with directional yet conventional take-over requests. Based on results from the literature concerning directional take-over requests, we designed three different modality configurations. In contrast to previous studies and because of the background of a later cooperative take-over, we focused on perception, taskload and criticality assessment of the directional information instead of evaluating purely human take-over performance. Results indicate better perception for configurations with an auditory component, yet taskload and criticality ratings were not affected by the different modalities.