Abstract
To explore the relation between drivers' eye movements and vehicle steering performance, 25 participants were employed to drive a test vehicle on appointed tortuous routes. The drivers' visual behavior was measured while they were driving, and experiment data collected on motorway on-ramps and interchanges were used to analyze the drivers' visual characteristics. The distribution density of the fixation points showed that the drivers paid attention to the inner road edge when turning left and the outer road edge when turning right. Meanwhile, the heights of the gaze targets hardly changed. Therefore, a further investigation discovered that the gaze trajectory was parallel to the vehicle's driving trajectory on one-way curves. Then, six types of gaze trajectories were derived, and models for each type were established. Combining these models with the fact that gaze points are always distributed along the nearby road edge, it was deduced that the starting point of the gaze trajectory when driving on curves has a salient influence on the driver's gaze trajectory.
Highlights
Horizontal curves have long been recognized as road sections on which traffic accidents are likely to happen
Experimental investigations have found that the gaze trajectory is parallel to the vehicle’s driving trajectory, and types and models of gaze trajectory have been derived based on the research on vehicle driving trajectory
Combined with the discovery that gaze points are always distributed in the region close to the road edge, the following conclusions can be deduced
Summary
Horizontal curves have long been recognized as road sections on which traffic accidents are likely to happen. When driving on a curved section of road, the driver operates the vehicle by steering by the right amount at the right time, depending on the information obtained visually [7,8,9]. The curves driving conditions had been studied in many prior pieces of research that had tried to investigate the crucial visual cues for steering and the relationship between gaze targets and vehicle driving performance. These studies had shown that, on curves, eye movements and the vehicle’s steering operations are closely linked. Since the driver’s gaze behavior is closely bound to the task conditions, both in spatial and temporal terms, a perfect theory or model that can be used in any situation is difficult to derive [2, 10, 11]
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