Towards an interaction pattern language for human machine cooperation and cooperative movement

Current technological achievements and trends show that in a not too far future vehicles will become able to drive with highest levels of automation in different environments all over the world. Until then still many questions need to be solved. Such questions are how to get the driver back into the loop when problematic situations happen that the automation is unable to solve. Others ask the question how to involve drivers in the driving tasks if they want to drive partially automated. Such questions require answers in how cooperation between a machine in terms of a highly automated technical system and a human works and how tasks can be shared. This paper presents an approach how to improve the cooperation between two actors in different domains using interaction patterns. Interaction patterns can be applied for several use cases of cooperative movement, e.g. parent–child, teammates in sports and in highly automated driving. This paper presents an approach how interaction problems sourced in different use cases can be solved with interaction patterns. Inspired by linguistics and psychology, image schemas are used for technical design to structure and improve intuitiveness of these interaction patterns. The concept combines the approaches of design patterns and image schemas to create interactions that are grounded in our bodily experiences and can be applied to target-specific meaning necessary for human machine cooperation, e.g. in cooperative guidance and control of highly automated vehicles.