Real-time characterisation of driver steering behaviour

In recent years the application of driver steering models has extended from the off-line simulation environment to autonomous vehicles research and the support of driver assistance systems. For these new environments there is a need for the model to be adaptive in real-time, so the supporting vehicle systems can react to changes in the driver, their driving style, mood and skill. This paper provides a novel means to meet these needs by combining a simple driver model with a single track vehicle handling model in a parameter estimating filter – in this case an Unscented Kalman Filter. Although the steering model is simple, a motion simulator study shows it is capable of characterising a range of driving styles and may also indicate the level of skill of the driver. The resulting filter is also efficient – comfortably operating faster than real-time – and it requires only steer and speed measurements from the vehicle in addition to reference path. Adaptation of the steer model parameters is demonstrated along with robustness of the filter to errors in initial conditions, using data from five test drivers in vehicle tests carried out on the open road

Visuomotor control, eye movements, and steering : A unified approach for incorporating feedback, feedforward, and internal models

The authors present an approach to the coordination of eye movements and locomotion in naturalistic steering tasks. It is based on recent empirical research, in particular, on driver eye movements, that poses challenges for existing accounts of how we visually steer a course. They first analyze how the ideas of feedback and feedforward processes and internal models are treated in control theoretical steering models within vision science and engineering, which share an underlying architecture but have historically developed in very separate ways. The authors then show how these traditions can be naturally (re)integrated with each other and with contemporary neuroscience, to better understand the skill and gaze strategies involved. They then propose a conceptual model that (a) gives a unified account to the coordination of gaze and steering control, (b) incorporates higher-level path planning, and (c) draws on the literature on paired forward and inverse models in predictive control. Although each of these (a–c) has been considered before (also in the context of driving), integrating them into a single framework and the authors’ multiple waypoint identification hypothesis within that framework are novel. The proposed hypothesis is relevant to all forms of visually guided locomotion.Peer reviewe