S(C)ENTINEL - monitoring automated vehicles with olfactory reliability displays

Overreliance in technology is safety-critical and it is assumed that this could have been a main cause of severe accidents with automated vehicles. To ease the complex task of per- manently monitoring vehicle behavior in the driving en- vironment, researchers have proposed to implement relia- bility/uncertainty displays. Such displays allow to estimate whether or not an upcoming intervention is likely. However, presenting uncertainty just adds more visual workload on drivers, who might also be engaged in secondary tasks. We suggest to use olfactory displays as a potential solution to communicate system uncertainty and conducted a user study (N=25) in a high-fidelity driving simulator. Results of the ex- periment (conditions: no reliability display, purely visual reliability display, and visual-olfactory reliability display) comping both objective (task performance) and subjective (technology acceptance model, trust scales, semi-structured interviews) measures suggest that olfactory notifications could become a valuable extension for calibrating trust in automated vehicles

Mesoscopic theory for size- and charge- asymmetric ionic systems. I. Case of extreme asymmetry

A mesoscopic theory for the primitive model of ionic systems is developed for arbitrary size, $\lambda=\sigma_+/\sigma_-$, and charge, $Z=e_+/|e_-|$, asymmetry. Our theory is an extension of the theory we developed earlier for the restricted primitive model. The case of extreme asymmetries $\lambda\to\infty$ and $Z \to\infty$ is studied in some detail in a mean-field approximation. The phase diagram and correlation functions are obtained in the asymptotic regime $\lambda\to\infty$ and $Z \to\infty$, and for infinite dilution of the larger ions (volume fraction $n_p\sim 1/Z$ or less). We find a coexistence between a very dilute 'gas' phase and a crystalline phase in which the macroions form a bcc structure with the lattice constant $\approx 3.6\sigma_+$. Such coexistence was observed experimentally in deionized aqueous solutions of highly charged colloidal particles