Haptic shared control: smoothly shifting control authority?

TLDR

Human‑automation interaction suffers from persistent issues when either party fails to understand the other, and design guidelines emphasize continuous interaction and final human authority. This paper argues that haptic shared control satisfies these guidelines and reviews literature to provide evidence, while calling for future research on long‑term issues such as trust and skill retention. Experimental studies show short‑term benefits of haptic shared control—faster, more accurate vehicle control, lower effort, and reduced visual demand—yet evidence for long‑term improvements remains scarce.

Abstract

Literature points to persistent issues in human-automation interaction, which are caused either when the human does not understand the automation or when the automation does not understand the human. Design guidelines for human-automation interaction aim to avoid such issues and commonly agree that the human should have continuous interaction and communication with the automation system and its authority level and should retain final authority. This paper argues that haptic shared control is a promising approach to meet the commonly voiced design guidelines for human-automation interaction, especially for automotive applications. The goal of the paper is to provide evidence for this statement, by discussing several realizations of haptic shared control found in literature. We show that literature provides ample experimental evidence that haptic shared control can lead to short-term performance benefits (e.g., faster and more accurate vehicle control; lower levels of control effort; reduced demand for visual attention). We conclude that although the continuous intuitive physical interaction inherent in haptic shared control is expected to reduce long-term issues with human-automation interaction, little experimental evidence for this is provided. Therefore, future research on haptic shared control should focus more on issues related to long-term use such as trust, overreliance, dependency on the system, and retention of skills.