No abstract

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are becoming increasingly prevalent. The tuning of these systems would benefit from a deep knowledge of human behaviour, especially during emergency manoeuvres; however, this does not appear to commonly be the case. We introduced an instrumented steering wheel (ISW) to measure three components of force and three components of the moment applied by each hand, separately. Using the ISW, we studied the kick plate manoeuvre. The kick plate manoeuvre is an emergency manoeuvre to recover a lateral disturbance inducing a spin. The drivers performed the manoeuvre either keeping two hands on the steering wheel or one hand only. In both cases, a few instants after the lateral disturbance induced by the kick plate occurred, a torque peak was applied at the ISW. Such a torque appeared to be unintentional. The voluntary torque on the ISW occurred after the unintentional torque. The emergency manoeuvre performed with only one hand was quicker, since, if two hands were used, an initial fighting of the two hands against each other was present. Therefore, we propose to model the neuro-muscular activity in driver models to consider the involuntary muscular phenomena, which has a relevant effect on the vehicle dynamic response.

No abstract

The interaction between driver and vehicle is analyzed in the paper. The driver acts on the steering wheel to modify the trajectory and to control the vehicle during panic situations. The knowledge of the forces exerted by the driver at the steering wheel is useful for a better understanding of the driver steering action. The final aim is to inspire the development of haptic steering wheels for better tuning of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). An instrumented steering wheel has been used, which includes two six axis load cells to measure the forces and the moments exerted by the driver hands and six sensors used to measure the grip strength. Two maneuvers have been considered, a moderate speed turn and a kick plate test which simulates a panic situation with an impulsive lateral disturbance. For both of the two considered situations, some common driving behaviors have been highlighted and analyzed. The preliminary results encourage the development of haptic instrumented steering wheels, able to improve ADAS. Actually it seems possible to infer the driver steering purpose before the steering wheel is actually rotated.

No abstract