Abstract
The development of autonomous driving technology is pushed forward rapidly to improve the safety and smoothness of road traffic. However, few studies have investigated for evaluating how autonomous vehicles affect surrounding vehicles movements and drivers’ behaviors in mixed-traffic flow consisting of autonomous vehicles and manually driven vehicles. In previous studies, focusing on adaptive cruise control (ACC) system, we simulated mixedtraffic flow consisting of ACC vehicles and non-ACC vehicles at nearly critical density on driving simulator, and investigated characteristics of the traffic flow. In this study, we focused on higher density traffic flow than previous study and evaluated the safety and smoothness of the traffic flow and drivers’ behaviors. Even though the smoothness was improved with the increase of the mixture ratio of ACC vehicles in the results of this study, a case where a potential accident risk increased was observed with reference to the safety. In addition, it was revealed that drivers could afford to pay attention to their own driving and surroundings by the ACC vehicles being mixed.
