Abstract
Simulators have been used to evaluate drivers' reactions to various transportation products. Most researches, however, have been concentrated on their technical performance, thus this paper considers driver's motion perception on a vehicle simulator through the analysis of human sensibility ergonomics. A sensibility ergonomic method is proposed in order to improve the faithfulness of vehicle simulators. A simulator of a passenger vehicle consists of such three modules as vehicle dynamics, virtual environment, and motion representation modules. To evaluate drivers' feedback, human perceptions are categorized into a set verbal expressions collected and investigated to find the most appropriate ones for translation and angular accelerations of the simulator. The cut-off frequency of the washout filter in the representation module is selected as one of the most influencing sensibility factors. Sensibility experiments were carried out to find possible correlation between the verbal expressions and the cut-off frequency of the filter. This study suggests a methodology to obtain an ergonomic database that can be applied to the sensibility evaluation of dynamic simulators.
