Traffic jams occurring on highways cause increased travel time as well as increased fuel consumption and collisions. So-called phantom traffic jams are traffic jams that do not have a clear cause, such as a merging on-ramp or an accident. Phantom traffic jams make up 50% of all traffic jams and result from instabilities in the traffic flow that are caused by human driving behavior. Automating the longitudinal vehicle motion of only 5% of all cars in the flow can dissipate phantom traffic jams. However, driving automation introduces safety issues when human drivers need to take over the control from the automation. We investigated whether phantom traffic jams can be dissolved using haptic shared control. This keeps humans in the loop and thus bypasses the problem of humans' limited capacity to take over control, while benefiting from most advantages of automation. In an experiment with 24 participants in a driving simulator, we tested the effect of haptic shared control on the dynamics of traffic flow and compared it with manual control and full automation. We also investigated the effect of two control types on participants' behavior during simulated silent automation failures. Results show that haptic shared control can help dissipating phantom traffic jams better than fully manual control but worse than full automation. We also found that haptic shared control reduces the occurrence of unsafe situations caused by silent automation failures compared to full automation. Our results suggest that haptic shared control can dissipate phantom traffic jams while preventing safety risks associated with full automation.

中文翻译：

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用于消除幻觉交通拥堵的触觉共享控制

高速公路上发生的交通堵塞会导致行驶时间增加、油耗增加和碰撞事故增加。所谓的虚拟交通拥堵是指没有明确原因的交通拥堵，例如合并入口匝道或事故。幻影交通拥堵占所有交通拥堵的 50%，是由人类驾驶行为引起的交通流不稳定造成的。将车流中仅 5% 的车辆的纵向车辆运动自动化即可消除虚拟交通拥堵。然而，当人类驾驶员需要接管自动化控制时，驾驶自动化会带来安全问题。我们研究了是否可以使用触觉共享控制来解决虚拟交通拥堵。这使得人类能够参与其中，从而绕过人类接管控制能力有限的问题，同时受益于自动化的大部分优势。在驾驶模拟器中对 24 名参与者进行的实验中，我们测试了触觉共享控制对交通流动态的影响，并将其与手动控制和完全自动化进行了比较。我们还研究了在模拟无声自动化故障期间两种控制类型对参与者行为的影响。结果表明，触觉共享控制可以比完全手动控制更好地帮助消除虚拟交通拥堵，但比完全自动化更差。我们还发现，与完全自动化相比，触觉共享控制减少了由无声自动化故障引起的不安全情况的发生。我们的结果表明，触觉共享控制可以消除虚拟交通拥堵，同时防止与完全自动化相关的安全风险。