On the human control of vehicles: an experimental study of acceleration

This paper presents an experimental investigation of human control of vehicles carried out on the basis of general theories on human movement. The longitudinal and lateral accelerations are studied, and their relations with theo- ries of motor optimality principles, such as minimum jerk, minimum variance, and the two-thirds power law are highlighted. Data have been collected during the final exper- imental phase of the EU interactIVe project, in which a vehicle developed by Centro Ricerche Fiat has been used to demon- strate driver continuous support produced by an artificial co- driver, within a shared initiative framework. 24 subjects drove the vehicle on a test route twice: once with the system active, the other with the system silent. The test route is composed of urban arterials, extra urban and motorway roads, and takes approximately 40–45 min to be driven. The total database thus amounts to ~35 h of driving data recordings, for a total of ~1.2 M samples per signal. Statistical summary data are presented, which describe human preferred accelerations, cor- relation between acceleration, curvature, and speed, and be- tween longitudinal and lateral acceleration. Different driving modalities, corresponding to different motor strategies and primitives, are revealed. Comparisons with literature data are also made and discussed. The summary statistics may be useful for the design of future ADAS systems, and indeed they have been collected for the final tuning of the interactIVe co-driver.