Abstract

When Autonomous vehicles have come into the limelight both in the field of practical use and in the research domain, the continuous complexity of shared decision-making, liability, and ethics in a human-autonomy team is still finding ways to be resolved. Especially in level 4 autonomous vehicles, when almost everything is to be done by the autonomous system, the role of humans needs to be more structured. In this paper, we discuss the safety concern of a level 4 autonomous vehicle, keeping the human users in focus. We identify the critical safety concerns that can occur in a level 4 autonomous vehicle due to the autonomous system’s error and how humans in and out of the loop can play a role there. We have three major topics discussed in this paper regarding the safety of level 4 autonomous vehicles: 1) identification of major safety issues of a level 4 autonomous vehicle, where we discuss the safety issue that can arise and whether the human user’s invention can prevent the hazard, 2) discussion of the factors which needs to be considered to build an efficient Human-Machine Interface, through which the human user will be in the loop of the operation of the autonomous system and can play a crucial role to prevent potential safety hazard caused by the autonomous system error, 3) potential use of brain-machine interface technology to provide more robustness to the human-autonomy teaming in an autonomous vehicle context.