Effects of Simulator Motion on Driver Steering Performance with Various Visual Degradations

This paper investigates the effects of simulator motion on driver steering performance, and how this depends on the available visual information and external disturbances such as wind gusts. A human-in-the-loop driving experiment was performed in which twelve participants steered a fixedvelocity car to follow a winding road (target tracking, TT) while suppressing side-wind gusts (disturbance-rejection, DR). Driver performance with and without motion feedback is compared in six tasks: “regular” lane-keeping with optic flow, centerline tracking with optic flow, and centerline tracking without optic flow, all with both 5 and 100 m of preview. Performance is calculated in the frequency domain to separate TT and DR contributions. The results show that motion feedback always yields improved DR performance, but the actual improvement depends strongly on the available simulator visuals. TT performance is generally unaffected by motion feedback, except when preview is limited. We conclude that simulator motion is required to evoke realistic driver performance in tasks where substantial external disturbances are present, but not in disturbance-free tasks where a winding road is being followed.