A Nonlinear Model Describing Driver Behavior on Straight Roads

Abstract

Experiments on a CRT driving simulator are used to develop a closed-loop human operator model for straight road driving in the absence of any externally applied disturbance such as side wind gusts or road roughness. It is shown that a significant portion of the driver's control characteristics can be represented by a stationary, nonlinear system with a single visual input. The driver's visual input is considered to be the angle subtended between the heading axis and a line connecting a point on the lane center at a preview distance with his eyes. An optimization procedure is used to evaluate the model parameters, and it is found that the driver's action can be best represented by a pure time delay cascaded with a classical hysteresis nonlinearity. The self-excited limit cycle frequency and amplitudes of this model system are shown to agree closely with respective quantitative aspects of the experimental data confirming the validity of the model.