Experimental Investigation and Modeling of Driver's Frontal Pre-crash Postural Anticipation

This paper presents the first experiment managed within the framework of the regional French project ST2 (French acronym for Sciences and Technologies for Safety in Transports). This program aims to study human pre-crash behavior in order to improve the efficiency of passive safety protection systems.

An experiment was carried out using a driving simulator of LAMIH for investigating drivers frontal pre-crash postural changes. A scenario of an unavoidable crash was designed. To increase the level of realism during the crash, a real impact was added between the windscreen and a foam rubber block in addition to a truck horn sound. Risk car driver postures just before a frontal crash have been determined. The results have shown that none of the subjects adopted the standardized driving position during the collision and 30% of the subjects adopted a position with the left hand placed in front of steering wheel which can be considered as a risk position. This is confirmed by a simulation using Madymo.

In order to develop a pre-crash driving postural prediction model, a methodology of quantifying pre-crash postures has been proposed using a digital model developed by INRETS.