Abstract
Recently, there has been a growing interest in research towards autonomous vehicles, aiming to improve efficiency, safety, comfort and to eliminate human errors. However, a question arises: what should set the speed of the vehicle? The road legal limit, the maximum possible given the traffic conditions, the road critical speed or any other matter? Moreover, it has been mentioned in literature that drivers feel unsafe when using cruise control systems, namely in cornering conditions. Therefore, to study the driver’s behaviour when cornering, a test vehicle was equipped with a dedicated data acquisition system to acquire the vehicle dynamics and the driver heart rate. Trials with volunteers were carried out on a 22 km selected route, consisting of multiple types of roads, from city roads to highways. Based on the field results, we propose a control strategy for the vehicle speed when cornering relating the curve radius with the centrifugal acceleration. The proposed control strategy could be easily adopted by advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. The reproduction of a human-like behavior will enhance the perception of safety and comfort of both the driver and occupants.
KEYWORDS – Autonomous vehicle, Driver behaviour, Driver feeling of safe, Cornering velocity.