A temporal analysis of safety drivers taking back control in public roadway automated driving trials

Abstract

In 2019, industry is in the testing stages of level 4 SAE/NHTSA automated vehicles. While in testing, L4 vehicles require a safety driver to monitor the driving task at all times. These specially trained drivers must take back control if the vehicle doesn’t seem to be responding correctly to the ever-changing roadway and environment. Research suggests that monitoring the driving task can lead to a decrease in vigilance over time. Recently, Waymo publicly released takeover request and mileage data on its 2018 L4 autonomous vehicle takeover requests. From this data, which was represented in mileage, we created temporal metric which showed that there were typically 150-250 hours without a takeover request. From this we suggest that there may be a decrement in vigilance for Waymo safety drivers. While there are still many unknowns, we suggest Waymo release takeover requests in terms of time rather than mileage and provide more information on the operational design domains of these vehicles. Expanding the content of this publicly-released data could then give researchers and the public more understanding of the conditions under which safety drivers are functioning.