Evaluation of the SAGAT method for highly automated driving

The Situation Awareness (SA) by Endsley is an often used construct to describe human’s perception and performance while driving motor vehicles. One method to assess the SA of the driver is the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) by Endsley which is often used in driving simulators. In the last decades, the number of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) increased rapidly and the trend moves towards more complex semi and highly automated systems. In those systems the driver is often used as a fallback if a failure occurs and therefore the driver has to be aware of the current traffic situation. At the present time, there is no review known to the authors, whether the SAGAT-method can be used for evaluating the SA of drivers while driving semi or highly automated vehicles. To answer this question a driving simulator study was conducted at the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. In this study, 45 participants drove the highly automated driving concept Conduct-by-Wire and a manual car on 4 days at the interval of 7 days. It shows that there are in summary only little differences between the driving modes. It can also be shown, that the relevant cues for the SAGAT method are learned by the drivers since a significant learning effect was detected. Based on these findings the usefulness of the SAGAT method is discussed and an outlook on future work is presented