Abstract
Driving comfort is of great significance for rural highways, since the variation characteristics of driving speed are comparatively complex on rural highways. Earlier studies about driving comfort were usually based on the actual geometric road alignments and automobiles, without considering the driver’s visual perception. However, some scholars have shown that there is a discrepancy between actual and perceived geometric alignments, especially on rural highways. Moreover, few studies focus on rural highways. Therefore, in this paper the driver’s visual lane model was established based on the Catmull-Rom spline, in order to describe the driver’s visual perception of rural highways. The real vehicle experiment was conducted on 100 km rural highways in Tibet. The driving rhythm was presented to signify the information during the driving process. Shape parameters of the driver’s visual lane model were chosen as input variables to predict the driving rhythm by BP neural network. Wavelet transform was used to explore which part of the driving rhythm is related to the driving comfort. Then the probabilities of good, fair and bad driving comfort can be calculated by wavelets of the driving rhythm. This work not only provides a new perspective into driving comfort analysis and quantifies the driver’s visual perception, but also pays attention to the unique characteristics of rural highways.
Highlights
As functional requirements of roads and automobiles have advanced over the years, increasing attention has been paid to driving comfort
Driving rhythm refers to the tempo at which the drivers perceive road conditions and generate driving behaviour responses, namely, regular and rhythmic changes generated by combinative visual perception and physical sensation during the driving process
The driving rhythm is the tempo at which the drivers perceive road conditions and generate driving behaviour responses, indicating large amounts of information during the driving process
Summary
As functional requirements of roads and automobiles have advanced over the years, increasing attention has been paid to driving comfort. The driving comfort on rural highways from driver’s visual perception is a critical topic urgently in need of research. From the point of view of the vertical alignment, vertical acceleration is a dominant factor [11], and vertical curvatures of highways should satisfy the demand of driving comfort [12]. Baykal [14] and Yang et al [15] pointed out that the lateral change of acceleration can combine curvature, ultra-high and longitudinal slope together, which directly affects the driving comfort on highways. There is little attention paid to driver’s visual perception for driving comfort analysis. The driving rhythm on rural highways was analysed to represent the driving comfort during the driving process
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