Shaping Automated Driving to Meet Societal Mobility Needs: The HADRIAN Project

Research and development of high levels of automated driving (AD) vehicles has received considerable attention in recent years. Thereby, for the time being, humans will remain actively involved to assure overall safety, whether as drivers, safety drivers, or tele-operators. This effectively shifts human tasks and responsibilities compared to manual driving. To make these shifts as safe and comfortable as possible and also reliable and predictable to use, the Horizon Europe research and innovation project HADRIAN (Holistic Approach for DRiver role IntegrAtioN) investigated and evaluated holistic, user-centered solutions. Thereby, the HADRIAN consortium envisioned a larger eco-structure from which it would be possible to reconceptualize what is part of driving automation and how it works. This meant to include parts of the roadside information infrastructure as well as to directly include the human driver in two specific ways: first by designing AD solutions that directly support their mobility needs and constraints. And secondly, by shaping the AD solutions that allow drivers to perform their new tasks and responsibilities more safely and comfortably. In this volume we describe how such holistic, user centered approach allows to derive better and more powerful solutions than those that are merely focused around the vehicle. For this we report the results of a series of innovations and their evaluations and demonstrations in the field. We conclude with how such approach also requires more tightly connected and inter-disciplinary team collaborations than are often found in current research and development organizations. In this first chapter we introduce the underlying human factors problems of currently available levels of AD and thereby motivate the starting point for the holistic user-centered approach and solutions that are then described to greater extent in the following chapters.