Driving Simulators for the Evaluation of Human-Machine Interfaces in Assisted and Automated Vehicles is a concise reference work on driving simulators, which conveys the technology behind simulator systems used to test driver assistance systems and automated vehicles, including electric vehicles. Coverage includes architecture, computer graphics, evaluation parameters and applied examples. A driving simulator is a device that has the function of presenting similar visual, auditory and force perceptions to those experienced during driving, creating the illusion that the driver is driving an actual car. The advantage of tests using a driving simulator is that it can reproduce dangerous traffic situations and tests safely. Driving simulators are also valuable in research and development into intelligent driving systems, allowing for testing and evaluation in a simulation environment rather than on the road. With its concise selection of relevant material and applied focus, this book will be of use to research and development professionals in industry and academic researchers whose work involves automotive systems and technologies in general, and particularly those working on driving simulators and automated driving.
Inspec keywords: user interfaces; safety systems; traffic engineering computing; road safety; driver information systems
Other keywords: road safety; safety systems; human computer interaction; user interfaces; traffic information systems; driver information systems; traffic engineering computing; mobile radio
Subjects: Textbooks; Traffic engineering computing; Reviews and tutorial papers; resource letters; General and management topics; Drives; Handbooks and dictionaries; Vehicle mechanics; Monographs, and collections; Engineering mechanics; Education and training; General electrical engineering topics; General topics in manufacturing and production engineering; Road-traffic system control
The paper introduced objectives and the history of DS and the large-scale DS developed in recent years. A DS equipped with functions that involve longitudinal movement and lateral movement can simulate ordinary driving scenarios to emergency driving scenarios, and can also present large acceleration/deceleration to experimental participants. This shows that it is possible to use a DS to evaluate the ADAS that supports emergencies and the evaluation of future automated driving systems. In addition, with the progress of virtual reality technology, it has become possible to present visual information to experimental participants using a high-resolution device, and in the future, small-scale driving will be utilized by utilizing head-mounted display technology.
A driving simulator (DS) is a device that can reproduce driving scenes and road traffic environments on a computer and simulate driving. There are several levels of simulators such as computer games, simulators for driving schools, and simulators for research and development. In the case of computer games, it can be said to be a simple DS that simulates driving operations if it is possible to drive with steering and pedal operations. However, in the full-fledged DS that uses a large screen and real car seats, reproduction of sensible acceleration and simulation of road traffic environments are emphasized.
The architecture of a driving simulator (DS) is mainly composed of two types of components: hardware and software. However, if we consider the DS as a whole system, we must also include the human part. That is at least one person technically capable of making a diagnosis of the problems and dealing with them when they occur, someone knowing what is possible to be achieved with the simulator and correctly advise the users in their research. In general, that person or the group of persons in charge of a DS must have not only the knowledge about the simulator itself but a good understanding of the goals of the research and how the simulator performs best in different scenarios. In most cases that knowledge comes from trial and error and becomes an accumulation of techniques applied to overcome difficulties such as simulator sickness, and lack of fidelity in the physical, visual, and other feedback given to the driver. It also includes building practical dynamic scenarios and dealing with many other operational issues that may exist. Each simulator has strengths and weaknesses; specific knowledge is always necessary to use or deal correctly with them. However, knowledge of another simulator's design and usage is highly recommended, and the persons in charge of a simulator should have the opportunities to study other simulators. This knowledge not only helps to make better use of the simulator, but it also gives useful indications on how to improve or upgrade an existing simulator architecture. To conclude on this point, when building or purchasing a new simulator, the human component of the system is an essential point to consider; it is as critical as other components of the simulator.
About the computer graphics in a driving simulator, we could conveniently say that its role is to represent the visual environment as realistically as possible. Because of the limitations of computer hardware, performance requirements, and the need for easiness of data creation, many techniques have been developed historically. A large part of the techniques developed for driving simulator comes from the computer game market, virtual reality, and computer graphics for general content creation. In this chapter, we describe recent techniques used in computer graphics, why, and how we use them in simulations.
When analysing driver behaviour using simple driving simulator (DS), advanced DS, and full-scale DS such as those at the University of Leeds, it is necessary to under-stand how to detect the driver's line of sight, handle the driver's response time, measure brain waves and cerebral blood flow, understand the driver's condition by heart rate (HR), estimate the driver's condition from driving performance, analyse steering operation, understand simulator sickness, reliability of DS, advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) evaluation method, automatic driving evaluation method, etc. This chapter explains these issues.
In this chapter, we introduce three ADAS and three automated driving studies using DS conducted at Shibaura Institute of Technology. The first study for ADAS is presented. "A study on the effect of HUD information on driving operation," the technology of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) is used to communicate the information (position and velocity) of the vehicle with each other in the blind spot. We introduce an example of evaluating the effectiveness of a system that informs the driver of vehicles existence by Head Up Display (HUD) using a driving simulator (DS).