How Will We Travel Autonomously? User Needs for Interior Concepts and Requirements Towards Occupant Safety

Autoren

Anna-Lena Köhler, MSc, Fabian Prinz, MSc, Lining Wang, MSc, Julian Becker, MEng, Gudrun Mechthild Irmgard Voß, MSc, Dr. phil. Stefan Ladwig, Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lutz Eckstein, Institut für Kraftfahrzeuge (ika), RWTH Aachen University;
Dr.-Ing. Thorolf Schulte, Dr.-Ing. Nico Depner, fka GmbH, Aachen

Zusammenfassung

In the context of autonomous driving, additional possibilities for passenger occupation arise. Parallel to this, vehicle concepts especially in the field of autonomous driving provide more degrees of freedom to apply novel interior concepts and seating configurations. To derive user requirements early on in the development process in this new field, three user studies in two research projects were conducted. As autonomous driving technologies take the focus away from the driving task, interior design in general and seating can be modified to allow different activities other than driving. A user study in the research project UNICARagil focused on the interior design and seat arrangement of a highly automated shuttle concept. By bringing users close to the use case of
riding in an autonomous shuttle in a workshop situation, an early user integration was achieved. In this vein, more degrees of freedom in seat arrangement lead to a need to review existing restraint systems regarding their applicability to the autonomous context.
Moreover, two user studies were conducted with the EU H2020 project OSCCAR in order to provide input to a matrix for selecting the most relevant test cases. The goal isto derive and design novel safety principles for advanced, safe, and comfortable sitting postures. While one study focused on preferred seat rotations, the second study examined the impact of different user scenarios on preferred sitting postures in an artificial autonomous driving situation. Results provide insights into the perception of seat rotations and detailed sitting postures that are most likely to be obtained by occupants in future use cases. The results of the user studies of the two projects independently revealed valuable insights, which will help to derive requirements towards occupant safety in future vehicle concepts.

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