Evaluation of an Active Safety Light using Virtual Test Drive within Vehicle in the Loop

Abstract

Driving at night time increases the risk of accidents because the driver's perception is reduced to the limited area of the environment which is illuminated by the car's head lights. In the study presented in this paper, the tool Vehicle in the Loop (VIL) is used the first time to research the potential of a new light function. VIL is a Virtual Reality application and simulation setup which allows for testing driver assistance systems in critical driving situations while driving a real car, but without the risk of collisions with real objects. VIL is based on the Virtual Test Drive (VTD) simulation software. The Active Safety Light is an advanced light functionality which illuminates the potential escape path a driver should take in order to avoid an imminent accident. The two main results of this first field study are, that VIL is suitable to study advanced light functions and that the Active Safety Light supports the driver in critical situations. The driver reacts nearly 60 ms faster and the situation is estimated as more critical so that the driver brakes instinctively harder, i.e. the break pressure is increased by almost a factor of two.

In-your-face, yet unseen?

“…virtual traffic participants, in order to safely test driver assistance systems [3]. Their technique was successfully used for evaluating a system, which supports drivers in evasion maneuvers [5]. Using a HMD as a HUD replacement has also been considered in the field of aerospace cockpits [9].…”

You've Got the Look

“…Consequently, optical see-through HMDs have been used in the automotive domain to augment virtual traffic participants onto a real test setup [3]. The same system has been successfully implemented to evaluate evasion maneuver visualizations [17]. Lauber and Butz compared HMD and HUD visualizations in the car [14], revealing first insights on the particularities of using optical see through HMDs while driving.…”

Vehicle-in-the-Loop in Global Coordinates for Advanced Driver Assistance System

“…However, the working algorithm of VIL for ADAS simulation was not published and only showed the environment in which the study was conducted. The studies in [17][18][19][20][21]31] use VIRES's Virtual Test Drive (VTD) without revealing the algorithm. [22,23] and [28] also constructed their VIL system with commercial simulation tools, CarMaker and CarSim.…”

“…Thomas Bock proposed a hardware configuration that links augmented reality to existing vehicle simulators [15,16]. Laschinsky has shown that it can be applied in the development of active safety lights to conduct tests in the daytime [17]. VIL is used for driver reaction of critical situations [18][19][20][21].…”

“…This information can be generally defined by the distance A L , incidence angle B L , the curvature of the lane C L , and the rate of curvature changing D L . The distances between the line and the ego vehicle and the incidence angle can be calculated using (17) and (18). The position x EGO FW , y EGO FW is generally defined as the center axis of the front wheel in the ego vehicle to obtain the relative distance.…”