Passengers Comfort during Automated Motorway Lane Changes

Authors

C. Heimsath – FKFS, W. Krantz - IFS, J. Neubeck, C. Holzapfel - KFFS, A. Wagner - FKFS&IFS

Summary

This paper presents a recent subject study on passenger’s comfort during highly auto-mated motorway lane changes. The study is carried out at the full-scale moving Stuttgart Driving Simulator and focusses on the comfort and safety perception during fully automated motorway lane changes. Different lane change styles are evaluated, where not only the lane change trajectory, but also the use of the yaw and side slip angle degrees of freedom for trajectory tracking is varied. The tracking strategy is varied by using a virtual all-wheel steering model and controller, which can operate the rear axles steering independently from the front axles steering. Two different cruising speeds (120 and 180 km/h) and two different subject’s view directions (Eyes-On and Eyes-Off) are considered. Subjects input their subjective comfort ratings directly after each lane change on a tablet computer during the ride. This execution mode allows for a large number of samples per subject within a reasonable test duration. The comfort influence of different lane change trajectories, found in a former study [1], could be validated for the slower cruising speed of 120 km/h. The results confirm the comfort beneficial integration of curvature-dependent asymmetric lane change trajectories. For different steering modes, no statistically relevant influence could be found at any test condition.