Research in the field of unmanned road vehicles, especially autonomous vehicles, has been increasing over the last decades. However, fully autonomous road vehicles are still far from being a reality, particularly in urban areas due to the fact that the machine is still not fully capable of correctly interpreting its environment. Therefore, teleoperated road vehicles present a transitional solution, where a human driver is brought back into the control loop, but without having to be physically present in the vehicle. The information between the vehicle and operator is transmitted through mobile networks. The connection cannot be guaranteed at all times and it cannot be predicted when a connection loss is going to happen. Therefore, an appropriate safety concept for a connection loss is required. This paper presents the safety concept named Free Corridor' as a solution to the problem. Here, the human decides which path the vehicle would follow in the case of a connection loss, thus avoiding the decision-making problem of autonomous vehicles. This paper shows the implementation of the concept Free Corridor and shows that it is a suitable concept for teleoperated road vehicles.
The future mobility of urban areas is changing constantly; ideally, vehicles should be able to drive autonomously through traffic. Unfortunately, autonomous vehicles are not yet fully capable of matching human performance. Therefore, the teleoperation of vehicles presents a solution for this task. During teleoperation, a human driver is responsible for driving the vehicle using information transmitted from the vehicle to a working station. Unfortunately, because of the artificial environment in which the operator is located, it is very difficult to achieve high telepresence and accurate speed estimation. It is known that in order to safely drive a vehicle, it is very important to be able to correctly estimate the vehicle's speed. This paper presents a study conducted to quantify the speed perception tendency of a human operator at the working station. Additionally, it is shown that a training process can at least temporarily improve speed perception. Furthermore, the implementation of zoom blur to increase optical flow is shown to positively influence speed perception. Four hypotheses are defined and analysed to study speed perception at an operator's working station. The results are presented and discussed.
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