ABSTRACT
This chapter tests, validates, and evaluates a virtual assistant for automated driving that focuses on coordination, communication of state, and the transfer of context-specific information during handover. The assistant is deemed to be applicable to both academia and industry as it presents solutions to many of the human factors considerations in the automated vehicle (AV) domain. The handover assistant was tested alongside a handover assistant that is currently available in manufactured vehicles and compares outcomes such as vehicle control, usability, acceptance, trust, communication, and workload. The findings provide a promising outlook on the development of a cooperative, multimodal, context-sensitive virtual assistant and provides insights into how this could be achieved through vocal and visual human-machine interfaces (HMIs) with elements. Notably, handover assistants can improve all human factors outcomes without a single outcome becoming degraded. This demonstrates that careful, stepwise interaction design can provide design solutions that improve safety, user interaction, and can serve as competitors in the present-day automobile market.
