Game theoretic lane change strategy for cooperative vehicles under perfect information

Lane change maneuvers are main causes of traffic turbulence at highway bottlenecks. We propose a dynamic game framework to derive the system optimum strategy for a network of cooperative vehicles interacting at a merging bottleneck. Cooperative vehicles on the highway mainline seek for optimal strategies (i.e., whether and when to perform...

Safety implications of higher levels of automated vehicles: a scoping review

Automated vehicles (AVs) promise to improve road safety, reduce traffic congestion and emissions, and enhance mobility. However, evidence regarding their safety benefits has not been systematically investigated and documented. In this study, we utilise a scoping review approach to investigate and synthesise the existing literature on higher...

Risk perception: A study using dashcam videos and participants from different world regions

Objective: Research has shown that perceived risk is a vital variable in the understanding of road traffic safety. Having experience in a particular traffic environment can be expected to affect perceived risk. More specifically, drivers may readily recognize traffic hazards when driving in their own world region, resulting in high perceived...

External Human–Machine Interfaces: The Effect of Display Location on Crossing Intentions and Eye Movements

In the future, automated cars may feature external human–machine interfaces (eHMIs) to communicate relevant information to other road users. However, it is currently unknown where on the car the eHMI should be placed. In this study, 61 participants each viewed 36 animations of cars with eHMIs on either the roof, windscreen, grill, above the...

Interactions between cyclists and automated vehicles: Results of a photo experiment*

Cyclists may have incorrect expectations of the behaviour of automated vehicles in interactions with them, which could bring extra risks in traffic. This study investigated whether expectations and behavioural intentions of cyclists when interacting with automated cars differed from those with manually driven cars. A photo experiment was...

Cooperative distributed predictive control for collision-free vehicle platoons

The rapidly developing computing and communication technologies improve the autonomy of individual vehicles on the one hand and facilitate the coordination among vehicles on the other. In the context of dynamic speed management, this study considers a platoon of intelligent vehicles that are required to maintain desired inter-vehicle spaces and...

Cyclists’ expectations when encountering automated vehicles: results of an international photo-based questionnaire

In the future, cyclists will be sharing the roads with automated and traditional vehicles [1]. Interactions between cyclists and automated vehicles (AVs) may differ from interactions with traditional vehicles, because cyclists may hold incorrect expectations about how AVs will react to their presence, leading to confusing and risky situations....

Blind driving by means of auditory feedback

Driving is a safety-critical task that predominantly relies on vision. However, visual information from the environment is sometimes degraded or absent. In other cases, visual information is available, but the driver fails to use it due to distraction or impairment. Providing drivers with real-time auditory feedback about the state of the...

Sonifying the location of an object: A comparison of three methods

Auditory displays are promising for informing operators about hazards or objects in the environment. However, it remains to be investigated how to map distance information to a sound dimension. In this research, three sonification approaches were tested: Beep Repetition Rate (BRR) in which beep time and inter-beep time were a linear function...

The use of navigation systems in naturalistic driving

Objective: In this study, we assessed the use of portable navigation systems in everyday driving by applying in-vehicle naturalistic driving. Method: Experienced users of navigation systems, 7 females and 14 males, were provided with a specially equipped vehicle for approximately 1 month. Their trips were recorded using 4 cameras, Global...

Safety analysis of passing maneuvers using extreme value theory

The increased availability of detailed trajectory data sets from naturalistic, observational and simulation-based studies are a key source for potential improvements in the development of detailed safety models that explicitly account for vehicle conflict interactions and the various driving maneuvers. Despite the well-recognized research...

Road safety and bicycle usage impacts of unbundling vehicular and cycle traffic in Dutch urban networks

Bicycle-motor vehicle crashes are concentrated along distributor roads where cyclists are exposed to greater volumes of high-speed motorists than they would experience on access roads. This study examined the road safety impact of network-level separation of vehicular and cycle traffic in Dutch urban networks, a strategy for which the term ...

A conceptual framework for road safety and mobility applied to cycling safety

Scientific literature lacks a model which combines exposure to risk, risk, and the relationship between them. This paper presents a conceptual road safety framework comprising mutually interacting factors for exposure to risk resulting from travel behaviour (volumes, modal split, and distribution of traffic over time and space) and for risk ...

A methodology for improving road safety by novel infrastructural and invehicle technology combinations

Introduction Still too many deaths and injuries are a result of road safety limitations within Europe. Road safety measures aimed to change the road environment to reduce the risks on driver errors and to reduce the seriousness of the effects of driver errors are expected to increase road safety. A suitable combination of new technologies with...

Preparing drivers for dangerous situations: A critical reflection on continuous shared control

Shared control (also known as continuous haptic guidance or haptically active controls) has recently been introduced in car driving. With shared control, the driver receives continuous force feedback on the gas pedal or steering wheel, so that human and machine conduct the driving task simultaneously. Experiments in driving simulators have shown...