Reconfiguration of Vibro-tactile Feedback in Vehicles

Until now driver-assistance systems mostly uses the visual and auditive sensory channels for delivering feedback to the driving person. But with steadily increasing number and complexity of in-car services and assistance applications, the interaction between the driver and the vehicle may result in a overload situation, which implicates that the driver has no longer the capacity to process all upcoming information necessary for harmlessly operating the car. Incorporating haptics as additional sensory modality is rather uncommon today, although it would have large potential. The tactile channel would be always ready to receive information via the car seat and it could be used in a natural, intuitive, and non-distracting manner. Additionally, a vibro-tactile display would not be affected from limitations, typically occuring during information processing on the visual and auditive sensory channels (for instance glaring sunlight or environmental noise). Thus, using tactile stimulation has the ability to make driving safer by releasing cognitive load from the visual and auditive channels. But, as opposed to vision and sound, haptic feedback necessitates some driver and environment calibration. Different sizes and weights of drivers results in changed haptic perception, patterns potentially are noticed only partly as each person has its own sitting behaviour. Motor vibrations from the dynamic process of driving, or shocks caused by road conditions, have to be absorbed or considered in the tactile feedback generation. We propose a vibro-tactile seat, endowed with a set of sensors and actuators embedded into the seat. The input channel is used for (i) identification of drivers covered seating surface, and (ii) observation of influencing vibrations from the environment, with the objective of dynamically reconfiguring haptic output on the seat.