Road departure crash warning system field operational test: methodology and results. Volume 1: technical report

Abstract

This report summarizes results from the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) Road Departure Crash Warning System Field Operational Test (RDCW FOT) project. This project was conducted under a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Dept. of Transportation and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, along with its partners, Visteon Corporation and AssistWare Technologies. Road departure crashes account for 15,000 fatalities annually in the U.S. This project developed, validated, and field-tested a set of technologies intended to warn drivers in real time when the driver was drifting from their lane, and a curve-speed warning system designed to provide alerts to help driver slow down when approaching a curve too fast to safely negotiate the curve This report describes the field operational test of the system and subsequent analysis of the data to address the suitability of similar systems for widespread deployment within the U.S. passenger-vehicle fleet. Two areas were addressed: safety-related changes in driver performance including behavior that may be attributed to the system, and levels of driver acceptance in key areas. Testing used 11 passenger sedans equipped with RDCW and a data acquisition system that compiled a massive set of numerical, video, and audio data. Seventy-eight drivers each drove a test vehicle, unsupervised, for four weeks. The resulting data set captured 83,000 miles of driving, with over 400 signals captured at 10 Hz or faster. Analysis of the data shows that with the RDCW system active, relative to the baseline condition, drivers improved lanekeeping by remaining closer to the lane center and reducing the number of excursions near or beyond the lane edges. In addition, turn signal use increased dramatically. The data, however, were unable to confirm a change in driver’s curvetaking behaviors that could have been attributed to the curve speed warning system. Driver acceptance was generally positive in relation to the lateral drift component of the system, with reactions to the curve speed warning system being rather mixed. Many additional results and insights are documented in the report.National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/49242/1/99788.pd