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 Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg,
Sweden, developed a model to predict how drivers will steer just
before they begin to turn the wheel.
“We can perhaps see into the future,” lead researcher Ola Benderius
told Reuters Health.
The key is understanding that motorists who need to correct their
steering act reflexively and take the same amount of time –
approximately 0.4 seconds – to move regardless of the distance they
intend to correct, said Benderius, a vehicle systems researcher.
The new explanation of jerky steering could enable car designers to
build systems that might make safe corrections for errant drivers,
like those who fall asleep at the wheel, before they veer off the
road, Benderius said.
“The car might know more than they do,” he said. “The interesting
thing is that we can really know something before it has happened.”
Benderius and Gustav Markkula examined more than 1,000 hours of
driving data and found that 95 percent of 1.3 million steering
corrections lasted roughly 0.4 seconds, the authors reported at the
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 58th Annual
Meeting.
In 2013, vehicle crashes killed 32,719 Americans, according to the
U.S. Department of Transportation. More than 2.5 million people were
treated in emergency rooms as a result of vehicle accident injuries
in 2012, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
“Now we can know what the driver will do before they have done it.
You can look 0.4 seconds into the future. That is very good because
we can compensate for that, for instance, in an anti-skid system,”
Benderius said.
“If you know, for example, that the driver will pull the steering
wheel 80 degrees to the left, you can pull a little more on the
right side to compensate. You can compensate for the driver because
the driver doesn’t really know how the wheels are aligned, but the
system can measure them,” he said.
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Benderius said he has talked to Volvo about developing systems for
its cars based on his theory. In addition, he said, the same
principles could also apply to riding bicycles or horses.
Chris Gerdes, director of Stanford University’s Center for
Automotive Research, said he has seen similar reflexive patterns in
racecar drivers.
“The study provides some evidence that people are relying on
patterned behaviors,” Gerdes told Reuters Health. He was not
involved in the current study.
“If you have a good sense of what’s going on in the driver’s brain
as they’re steering, you could conceivably design more assistance
and support in that process. You’d know what is sort of the natural
response of the driver,” he said.
Gerdes said he could imagine the model being used in the Google cars
traveling around Stanford and Silicon Valley. Computers operate the
cars, but drivers are inside ready to take over when necessary.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1weiDh7 Proceedings of the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society 58th Annual Meeting, 2014.
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