Development of Hi-Fidelity Driving Simulator for Measuring Driving Behavior

A hi-fidelity driving simulator has been developed to measure driving behavior. Since the driver is an important component of Intelligent System (i.e., human factor), it is necessary to measure and investigate the driving behavior either with ITS or without ITS. As the driving behavior is situation dependent behavior, there is a great advantage from using the driving simulator because various situational (e.g., traffic situation) and environmental factors can be controlled. The driving simulator is composed of a 290 degree screen and a hexapod motion platform with a fully instrumented vehicle cabin. The road environment for the simulator was a town area with a complex road network and various buildings. The traffic control system can control a traffic scenario with 81 vehicles and 72 pedestrians. Since simulator sickness was one of main concerns of using the hi-fidelity driving simulator, we developed the Simplified Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSSQ) to evaluate the subjective severity of simulator sickness. The SSSQ consisted of three subscores for nausea, oculomotor, and disorientation symptoms. A preliminary experiment was conducted to investigate the change in severity of the sickness and the mental workload using SSSQ and NASA-TLX when simulator driving was repeated twelve times. We found that the severity of simulator sickness and the workload decreased with repeated simulator drives. When focusing on the change among three simulator drives within one day, the Nausea subscore decreased but the Oculomotor subscore increased.