Expanded Situational Awareness Without Vision: A Novel Haptic Interface for Use in Fully Autonomous Vehicles

This work presents a novel ultrasonic haptic interface to improve nonvisual perception and situational awareness in applications such as fully autonomous vehicles. User study results (n=14) suggest comparable performance with the dynamic ultrasonic stimuli versus a control using static embossed stimuli. The utility of the ultrasonic interface is demonstrated with a prototype autonomous small-scale robot vehicle using intersection abstractions. These efforts support the application of ultrasonic haptics for improving nonvisual information access in autonomous transportation with strong implications for people who are blind and visually impaired, accessibility, and human-in-the-loop decision making.