Effect of Fixed and sEMG-Based Adaptive Shared Steering Control on Distracted Driver Behavior.

Zheng Wang,Bo Yang,Kimihiko Nakano,Edric John Cruz Nacpil,Satoshi Suga

doi:10.3390/s21227691

Zheng Wang, Bo Yang + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/s21227691

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Abstract

Driver distraction is a well-known cause for traffic collisions worldwide. Studies have indicated that shared steering control, which actively provides haptic guidance torque on the steering wheel, effectively improves the performance of distracted drivers. Recently, adaptive shared steering control based on the forearm muscle activity of the driver has been developed, although its effect on distracted driver behavior remains unclear. To this end, a high-fidelity driving simulator experiment was conducted involving 18 participants performing double lane change tasks. The experimental conditions comprised two driver states: attentive and distracted. Under each condition, evaluations were performed on three types of haptic guidance: none (manual), fixed authority, and adaptive authority based on feedback from the forearm surface electromyography of the driver. Evaluation results indicated that, for both attentive and distracted drivers, haptic guidance with adaptive authority yielded lower driver workload and reduced lane departure risk than manual driving and fixed authority. Moreover, there was a tendency for distracted drivers to reduce grip strength on the steering wheel to follow the haptic guidance with fixed authority, resulting in a relatively shorter double lane change duration.

Highlights

Steering a car necessitates continuous real-time visual information from the road ahead
The main effect was significant for the driver state in terms of lateral error at the end of second lane change (p < 0.05) and overall workload according to the NASA-TLX (p < 0.001), whereas no significant difference was observed for the main effect of HG and the interaction effect
Given that the experimental results in the current study were based on driving simulations, future studies could consider evaluation of sense of presence in relation to virtual environments. This driving simulator study focused on the effect of haptic guidance with adaptive authority on distracted driver behavior

Summary

Introduction

Steering a car necessitates continuous real-time visual information from the road ahead. A haptic shared steering control has been designed with an adaptive level of authority based on time-to-line crossing, and driver-in-the-loop experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system on decreasing conflict torques [10]. A time-varying assistance factor has been developed to modulate the haptic steering torque, which is designed from an integrated driver-in-the-loop vehicle model, and the effectiveness of proposed haptic shared control method on driver–automation conflict management has been presented by driving tests conducted with high-fidelity simulations [14]. A Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy control approach has been proposed to deal with the time-varying driver activity parameter and vehicle speed under multiple system constraints to improve driver–automation shared steering performance [17]. By assuming that drivers can learn and incorporate the controller strategy into their internal model for predictive path following, a driver model has been proposed to include interactive steering behavior based on model predictive control for indirect shared control has been proposed [20]

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