The behaviour of individual car drivers in real-world situations can be studied extensively with instrumented cars allowing for the measurement of variables realted to the dirver, vehicle and the environment. At the moment the Institute for Perception TNO has at its disposal the third version of such a car: the ICARUS (Instrumented Car for Road User Studies). In this latest version the on board instrumentation has been developed around a minicomputer system with floppy-disc data storage. System requirements were set by the results and procedures of earlier versions of the ICARUS. A system philosophy was developed with computer functions for in-line stimulus presentation, direct data processing, transducer calibration, monitoring and failure detection.
Abstract