Abstract
Vehicle driving support systems such as navigation and dead-angle warning
systems make us safer and more comfortable. Existing systems, however, provide only visual
and auditory information. Visual driving support systems may limit driver´s field-of-view and
auditory warning signals can lose in radio music, engine noise, or conversation noise.
Therefore, audio and visual displays have some limitations on providing safer information.
Tactile displays using vibration motors in the meantime can provide useful information
regardless of restricted field-of-view and noisy environment. It may quickly draw the
attention of the driver for issuing collision warning and directional cues. These intuitive and
quick cues may be combined together with the visual and auditory display to give multimodal
feedback to the driver. In this paper, we present a vibrotactile display device for providing
safety information to the drivers. Commercially available coin-type vibration motors are
vertically inserted in the pads and an embedded microprocessor controls the motors
sequentially. We also evaluate this system by using driving simulator which has 6 D.O.F.
Stewart-Platform and a 360° full-view using 8 projectors. Using driving simulator, we can
make some dangerous driving situations safely and can evaluate effectiveness of the proposed
vibrotactile display device. The evaluation results show that some navigation, lane and
obstacle detection aids are recognized on the average of about 93% success rate.
Keywords - Vibrotactile, Driving Safety Information, Driving Simulator