A number of active safety systems are already developed to support drivers’ decision and action to help avoid accidents, but further enhancement of those active safety systems cannot be accomplished without increasing our understanding on driver behaviors and their interaction with vehicle systems. For this reason, a state-of-art driving simulator (DS) has been developed that creates very realistic scenarios as a means of realizing these requirements.
The DS consists of a simulator cabin, turntable (inside the dome), a 6-DOF hexapod system, shakers (vehicle vertical vibration actuators), and a motion system capable of moving 35 meters longitudinally and 20 meters laterally. The system is also capable of projecting images of actual city streets and highways onto a 360° spherical screen inside of the dome. As a result, the DS is able to reproduce a driving environment that is very similar to real driving.
Utilizing the DS also helps us to evaluate the effect of driving without proper attention such as while drowsy or drunken, and to reproduce near miss scenarios that are impossible to perform in actual traffic environments or on test courses because they are dangerous and against the law. We believe the results obtained through these experiments should help significantly to contribute to the development of active safety systems.
