Integrated Active Seat Suspension for Enhancing Motion Comfort

Abstract

Teleoperation is considered as a viable option to control fully automated vehicles (AVs) of Level 4 and 5 in special conditions. However, by bringing the remote drivers in the loop, their driving experience should be realistic to secure safe and comfortable remote control. Therefore, the remote control tower should be designed such that remote drivers receive high quality cues regarding the vehicle state and the driving environment. In this direction, the steering feedback could be manipulated to provide feedback to the remote drivers regarding how the vehicle reacts to their commands. However, until now, it is unclear how the remote drivers' steering feel could impact occupant's motion comfort. This paper focuses on exploring how the driver feel in remote (RD) and normal driving (ND) are related with motion comfort. More specifically, different types of steering feedback controllers are applied in (a) the steering system of a Research Concept Vehicle-model E (RCV-E) and (b) the steering system of a remote control tower. An experiment was performed to assess driver feel when the RCV-E is normally and remotely driven. Subjective assessment and objective metrics are employed to assess drivers' feel and occupants' motion comfort in both remote and normal driving scenarios. The results illustrate that motion sickness and ride comfort are only affected by the steering velocity in remote driving, while throttle input variations affect them in normal driving. The results demonstrate that motion sickness and steering velocity increase both around 25% from normal to remote driving.

2nd Workshop on Multimodal Motion Sickness Detection and Mitigation Methods for Car Journeys - Finding Consensus in the Field

“…Motion sickness research spans across a multitude of domains, which is why it is not surprising that the methodologies used vary strongly (e.g. [13,17,19]). The length of conditions can vary between a few minutes up to over half an hour, with all experimental conditions being performed on the same day, or in separate sessions [19,21].…”