Examining the impacts of drivers’ emotions on takeover readiness and performance in highly automated driving

Abstract

SAE Level 3 automated vehicles often requires the driver to take control of the vehicle within a short period of time. Although this problem has received much attention the role of the driver's emotional state has still remained largely unexplored. To tackle this problem, a human subject experiment was conducted with 24 participants in a desktop driving simulator. The experiment adopted a within-subject design with four types of emotions: angry, sad, happy and calm. Results showed that emotions significantly affected drivers’ takeover readiness and performance in highly automated driving.