Linköping Studies in Science and Technology Licentiate Thesis No. 1203 A model for simulation and generation of surrounding vehicles in driving simulators Johan Janson Olstam LiU-TEK-LIC- 2005:58 Dept. of Science and Technology Linköpings Universitet, SE-601 74 Norrköping, Sweden Norrköping 2005 A model for simulation and generation of surrounding vehicles in driving simulators © 2005 Johan Janson Olstam johja@itn.se Department of Science and Technology Linköpings universitet, SE-601 74 Norrköping, Sweden. ISBN 91-85457-51-5 ISSN 0280-7971 LiU-TEK-LIC 2005:58 Printed by UniTryck, Linköping, Sweden 2005 Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank my supervisors Jan Lundgren, Linköping University (LiU), Department of Science and Technology (ITN), and Pontus Matstoms, VTI, for their invaluable support and advices.
Many thanks also to Mikael Adlers, VTI, who I have been working with during the integration and testing within the VTI Driving simulator III. He has a great part in that integration went successfully. Thanks also to the Swedish Road Administration (SRA), Ruggero Ceci, for funding this work. I would also like to show appreciation to my other colleagues at ITN/LiU and VTI, whom make ITN/LiU and VTI stimulating places to work at.
Special thanks to my roommate and PhD student colleague Andreas Tapani and to my other PhD student colleagues for very interesting and useful discussions, to Arne Carlsson, VTI, for sharing his knowledge within the traffic theory and simulation area, to Anne Bolling and Selina Mård Berggren, VTI, for their help during the design and the realization of the conducted driving simulator experiment, to Lena Nilsson and Jerker Sundström, VTI, for invaluable comments, and to the members of the VTI driving simulator group, Staffan, Mikael, Mats, Håkan, Håkan, and Göran, for sharing their massive experience within the driving simulator area. I would also like to express my gratitude to my family and friends for their encouragement and support. Last but not least, I would like to give all my love to Lin and to my two cuddly cats Marion and Morriz. i ii Abstract Driving simulators are used to conduct experiments on for example driver behavior, road design, and vehicle characteristics.
The results of the experiments often depend on the traffic conditions. One example is the evaluation of cellular phones and how they affect driving behavior. It is clear that the ability to use phones when driving depends on traffic intensity and composition, and that realistic experiments in driving simulators therefore has to include surrounding traffic. This thesis describes a model that generates and simulates surrounding vehicles for a driving simulator.
The proposed model generates a traffic stream, corresponding to a given target flow and simulates realistic interactions between vehicles. The model is built on established techniques for time-driven microscopic simulation of traffic and uses an approach of only simulating the closest neighborhood of the driving simulator vehicle. In our model this closest neighborhood is divided into one inner region and two outer regions. Vehicles in the inner region are simulated according to advanced behavioral models while vehicles in the outer regions are updated according to a less time-consuming model.
The presented work includes a new framework for generating and simulating vehicles within a moving area. It also includes the development of enhanced models for car-following and overtaking and a simple mesoscopic traffic model. The developed model has been integrated and tested within the VTI Driving simulator III. A driving simulator experiment has been performed in order to check if the participants observe the behavior of the simulated vehicles as realistic or not.
The results were promising but they also indicated that enhancements could be made. The model has also been validated on the number of vehicles that catches up with the driving simulator vehicle and vice versa. The agreement is good for active and passive catch-ups on rural roads and for passive catch-ups on freeways, but less good for active catch-ups on freeways. iii iv Contents 1 INTRODUCTION .1 CLASSIFICATION OF TRAFFIC SIMULATION MODELS .2 MICROSCOPIC TRAFFIC SIMULATION .3 BEHAVIORAL MODEL SURVEY .1 Car-following models .2 Lane-changing models.4 Speed adaptation models .25 3 SURROUNDING TRAFFIC IN DRIVING SIMULATORS .1 DRIVING SIMULATOR EXPERIMENTS.1 Experiments, scenarios, and scenes.2 USING STOCHASTIC TRAFFIC IN DRIVING SIMULATOR SCENARIOS .1 The stochastic traffic – Driving simulator dilemma .2 Stochastic traffic simulation and critical events.3 DEMANDS ON TRAFFIC SIMULATION WHEN USED IN DRIVING SIMULATORS .1 Rule-based models .3 The eco-resolution principle.36 4 THE SIMULATION MODEL.1 THE SIMULATION FRAMEWORK .1 Representation of vehicles and drivers.2 The moving window .3 The simulated area.4 The candidate areas.5 Vehicle update technique .2 Generation of new vehicles on freeways.3 Generation of new vehicle and vehicle platoons on rural roads.4 Initialization of the simulation.64 5 INTEGRATION WITH THE VTI DRIVING SIMULATOR III.1 THE VTI DRIVING SIMULATOR III .2 THE INTEGRATED SYSTEM.3 COMMUNICATION WITH THE SCENARIO MODULE .1 HOW SHOULD THE MODEL BE VALIDATED? .2 NUMBERS OF ACTIVE AND PASSIVE OVERTAKINGS .4 Results and analyses of the questionnaire .5 Results and analyses of the interview questions .1 Some additional observations.87 7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH.91 Appendices APPENDIX A – DRIVER/VEHICLE PARAMETER VALUES APPENDIX B – OVERTAKING PARAMETERS APPENDIX C – QUESTIONNAIRE APPENDIX D – INTERVIEW QUESTIONS APPENDIX E – ANSWERS FROM THE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS vi 1 Introduction 1.1 Background Traffic safety is a severe and important problem.
Many accidents are caused by failures in the interaction between the driver, the vehicle, and the traffic system. The number of driving related interactions is increasing. Drivers nowadays also interact with different intelligent transportation systems (ITS), advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), in-vehicle information systems (IVIS), and NOMAD devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and portable computers. These technical systems influence drivers’ behavior and their ability to drive a vehicle.
To be able to evaluate how different ITS, ADAS, IVIS, NOMAD- systems, or road and signal control designs etc influence drivers, knowledge about the interactions between drivers, vehicles and environment are essential. To get this knowledge researchers conduct behavioral studies and experiments, which either can be conducted in the real traffic system, on a test track, or in a driving simulator. The real world is of course the most realistic environment, but it can be unpredictable regarding for instance weather-, road- and traffic conditions. It is therefore often hard to design real world experiments from which it is possible to draw statistically significant conclusions.
Some experiments are also too dangerous or expensive to conduct in the real world and other are impossible due to laws or ethical reasons. Test tracks offer a safer environment and the possibility of giving test drivers more equal conditions and thereby decreasing the statically uncertainty. However, test tracks lack a lot in realism and it can be hard to evaluate how valid results from a test track study are for driving on a real road. Driving simulators on the other hand offer a realistic environment in which test conditions can be controlled and varied in a safe way.
A driving simulator is designed to imitate driving a real vehicle, see Figure 1.1 for an illustration. The driver place can be realized with a real vehicle cabin or only a seat with a steering wheel and pedals, and anything in between. The surroundings are presented for the driver on a screen. A vehicle model is used to calculate the simulator vehicle’s movements according to the driver’s use of the steering wheel and the pedals.
Some driving simulators use a motion system in order to support the driver’s visual impression of the simulator vehicle’s movements. Last but not least a driving simulator include a scenario module that includes the specification of the road, the environment, and all other actors and events.1 The VTI Driving Simulator III (Source: Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) (2004)) Driving simulators are used to conduct experiments in many different areas such as: • Alcohol, medicines and drugs. • Driving with disabilities. • Technical systems, such as ITS, ADAS, IVIS, and NOMAD systems.
• Fatigue • Road design • Vehicle design Driving simulators can also be used for training purposes. One example is the TRAINER simulator that was developed to work as a complimentary vehicle in driving license schools, (Gregersen et al. The TRAINER simulator offers great possibilities to train actions that are unsafe, difficult or impossible to train in the real road network. This could be anything between basic maneuvering to emergency situations.
It is important that the performance of the simulator vehicle, the visual representation, and the behavior of surrounding objects are realistic in order for the driving simulator to be a valid representation of real driving. It is for instance clear that the ambient vehicles must behave in a realistic and trustworthy way. Ambient vehicles influence the driver’s mental load and thereby his or her ability to drive the vehicle. A good representation of the ambient vehicles is especially important in simulator studies where the traffic intensity and composition has a large impact on the driver’s ability to drive the vehicle.
This can for instance be in experiments concerning road design, the use of new technical equipment, or fatigue. It is not only important that the behavior of a single driver is realistic, but 2 also that the behavior of the whole traffic stream is realistic. For instance, drivers who drive fast expect to catch up with more vehicles than catches up with them and vice versa. A realistic simulation of surrounding vehicles, and thereby traffic, can be achieved by combining a driving simulator with a model for microscopic simulation of traffic.
Micro-simulation has become a very popular and useful tool in studies of traffic systems. Micro models use different sub-models for car- following, lane-changing, speed adaptation, etc. to simulate driver behavior at a microscopic level. The sub-models, hereby called behavioral models, use the current road and traffic situation as inputs and generates individual driver’s decisions regarding for example which acceleration to apply and which lane to travel in as outputs.
Stochastic functions are often used to model variation in driver behavior, both among drivers and over time for a specific driver. However, stochastic traffic simulation models have traditionally not been used to simulate ambient vehicles in driving simulators. The usual approach has instead been to simulate the ambient vehicles according to deterministic models. There are for several reasons desirable to keep the variation in test conditions between different drivers as low as possible.
By using stochastic simulation of ambient traffic, drivers will experience different situations at the micro level depending on how they drive. The simulator driver’s conditions will still be comparable at a higher, more aggregated, level, if this is sufficient or not varies depending on the type of experiment. For some experiments, equal conditions at the micro level are essential and stochastic simulation may not be suitable to use. In other experiments, comparable conditions at a higher level are sufficient.2 Aim The aim of this thesis is to develop, implement, and validate a real-time running traffic simulation model that is able to generate and simulate surrounding vehicles in a driving simulator.
This includes integration of the developed model and a driving simulator. The model should both simulate individual vehicle-driver units and the traffic stream that they are a part of, in a realistic way. The simulated vehicle-driver units should behave realistically concerning acceleration, lane- changing, and overtaking behavior, as well as concerning speed choices. The vehicles should also appear in the traffic stream in such a way that headways, vehicle types, speed distributions, etc.
correspond to real data.3 Delimitations The simulation model has been delimited to only deal with freeways with two lanes in each direction and to rural roads with oncoming traffic. The model does not deal with ramps on freeways or intersections on rural roads. Consequently, the thesis does not deal with simulation of urban traffic situations. Some driving simulator experiments include critical situations or events.
To create such situations autonomous vehicles has to be combined with vehicles with predetermined behavior. The thesis only discusses this topic to a limited extent.