Abstract
As part of efforts to develop active safety systems, the characteristics of ordinary drivers are currently being researched using a highly realistic driving simulator (DS). However, as the number of tests in simulated city driving environments increases, motion sickness has become an issue for test subjects using this DS. This motion sickness is caused by an unnecessary vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) triggered by tilting of the DS, which uses combinations of tilt and translational (XY direction) motions to simulate acceleration. Since VOR is generated by the semicircular canal that senses angular acceleration, motion sickness can be alleviated by reducing the angular acceleration due to tilt. This can be accomplished by lowering the cutoff frequency of the low-pass filter (LPF) that defines the distribution of tilting and XY motions used to simulate acceleration. However, controlling the tilt angle acceleration in this way increases the amount of XY motion of the DS, raising the possibility that its XY motion limit may be exceeded. Therefore, this paper proposes a control method that lowers the cutoff frequency only when the XY motion range of the DS has a sufficient margin for increase. This method alleviates motion sickness while minimizing increases in the amount of XY motion.
KEYWORDS – driving simulator, motion sickness, motion drive algorithm, active safety, driver behavior