Within the context of active safety devices, the reported experiment deals with unintrusive driving assistances that intervene when a given level of risk in terms of lane departure is reached. A new system designed to produce some motor priming by applying some directional vibration on the steering wheel was introduced and tested. Our main objective was to determine in a controlled simulator setting if motor priming assistance can provides some benefit compared to more traditional auditory or vibratory warning devices. The working hypothesis was that auditory and vibratory warnings would improve the situation diagnosis, whereas motor priming would additionally improve the initiation of action. Results showed that all driving assistances reduced the duration of lateral excursion after visual occlusion. Motor priming was significantly more effective in that respect compared to auditory and vibratory warning. Thus, direct intervention at the action level proved to be more efficient that a simple warning favouring situation diagnosis. Also, no performance improvement was observed when motor priming or vibratory warning were combined with auditory warning, which fails to support the idea that multimodal directional information may improve driving assistance to lateral control. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting