Cooperation and the Role of Autonomy in Automated Driving

While automation in human–machine systems can increase safety and comfort, the 2016 lethal crash of an automated vehicle demonstrates that automation is not without its risk. Indeed, accidents from the air traffic domain also demonstrate that cooperation between human and machine is crucial and interaction design must be devoted great care. Therefore, the present paper aims at developing design recommendations to reduce the risks of lethal crashes with automated vehicles. To this end, the concepts of cooperation and autonomy are closely investigated. These two terms are central to research on human machine cooperation; however, the present definition of cooperation and the role of autonomy might be further specified for the domain of automated driving. Therefore, selected perspectives from different scientific fields (e.g., sociology and psychology) will be presented in order to develop a differentially inspired working definition of cooperation, which is tailored to the automated driving domain. Another goal of this approach is to investigate different views on the concept of autonomy, which is often entailed in work on cooperation. This can help clarify the role of autonomy in automated driving in particular. Moreover, insights from the presented theories and findings on cooperation can be transferred to the interaction design of automated vehicles. Accordingly, recommendations for interaction design will be presented. Finally, an example for the implementation of the working definition and the design recommendations will be presented by describing a prototype for automated driving—the H-mode prototype.