Research On Driver Acceptance Evaluation Of Adaptive Cruise Control System

Adaptive Cruise Control System(ACC)is a kind of Driver Assistance System which is developed based on traditional Cruise Control(CC)with a purpose to keep a desired and safety distance with the preceding vehicle automatically by means of the radar and other sensors.As ACC is an automatic system which is under the supervision of the drivers and need to work with them,the subjective and objective performance evaluation become the core technology of the latest ACC research carried out by the manufacturer.As with the objective performance evaluation,engineers form an integrated set of evaluation system which include test cases like Cruise Test,Follow Controller Test,Curve Capability Test and so on.These tests focus on the automobile kinematics and the performance of the vehicle dynamics to deploy the objective evaluation.Driver's acceptance is part of subjective evaluation and it is important as the ACC needs the driver to monitoring and cooperate with.Compared with objective evaluation,the research of subjective evaluation is less and carried out rather later.It lacks of systematic theoretical support and operating experience.Related researches have not been found in domestic,and there is not an accepted theory at home and abroad.Most ACC subjective evaluation tests were carried out by expert engineers and evaluation reports were submitted to point out the test result and improvement method.The significant drawbacks of this method is that it lacks of system supporting and the repeatability is poor.The participants who take part in evaluating should have rich professional experience.As the equipment ratio of ACC is increasing,a perfect subjective evaluation is needed.Experimental psychology theory has been widely used in the evaluation research of automatic system in recent years.An evaluation system including six indicators—mental workload,situation awareness,trust,locus of control and stress—has been formed.It is a challenge for engineers to connect the indicators with drivers and ACC-equipped vehicle's performance and form a semantic expression which is easy to understand and mark by average engineers.The indicator should show the acceptance of the drivers to the system and be fairly consistent with the objective evaluation indicators based on vehicle kinematics and dynamics.Aiming at the situation that it is lack of subjective evaluation method for ACC performance evaluation,a subject evaluation method considering driver's acceptance was put forward using experimental psychology indicators in this paper.In this research,four main indicators were raised including driver acceptance,safety,comfort and efficiency.The experimental psychology indicators were sub-indicators of driver acceptance.After dividing and explaining the main indicators,a scoring table including 10 sub-indicators was formed.The weight of the indicator was calculated by expert using triangular fuzzy analytic hierarchy process.For the objective evaluation,10 typical test cases were redefined and the performance parameters were analyzed.A Driver in Loop test platform was built and an ACC control strategy was transplanted into the platform in order to launch the evaluation task of ACC.A HMI was designed and deployed on the platform after all preparation.In this research,20 volunteers were asked to drive through all the typical 10.test cases and fill in the scoring table.Through the experiment.the Validity and feasibility of the evaluation method were verified,and the relevance between scores of subjective evaluation and performance parameters in objective evaluation.