Abstract
In Japan, there are a lot of earthquakes and many elevated highways in the traffic system that may receive effect from motion of the earthquake. Even though the elevated highways could withstand with earthquake intensity less than 3m/s^2 but the elevated highway will be closed for all vehicles when the earthquake intensity exceeds 0.8m/s^2. The vehicle and the driver's responses during an earthquake have not been elucidated. In this paper, steering operation as one of the driving behaviors is analyzed based on driver's steering energy, which is calculated from angular velocity of the steering wheel and driver's steering torque. The objective of this research is to clarify how and why the driver's steering responses are affected by the earthquake. To achieve this purpose, experiments using driving simulator and computer simulation are carried out. The model for analysis consists of an elevated highway model, a full vehicle model with six degrees-of-freedom, a brush tire model, and a front preview driver model.
