Vibrotactile Wristband for Warning and Guiding in Automated Vehicles

In this paper, we introduce a vibrotactile wristband for warning and guiding the driver based on the road condition in automated vehicles. The vibrotactile wristband can receive the command from the host computer in the vehicles via Bluetooth and generate the corresponding vibration patterns with six vibration motors. 3 vibration patterns are designed to guide the driver to the right direction in the manual driving state and 8 vibration patterns are designed to warn the driver about the problems which the driving support system can't solve in the automatic driving state. Based on tactile illusions, we convert the graphical markers into the vibration patterns to reduce the driver's memory burden and improve the accuracy of recognizing the patterns. In order to evaluate the performance of the vibrotactile wristband, a virtual driving environment is developed and the subject can experience the vibration patterns when he/she drives the virtual vehicle.