Driver Braking Performance as a Function of Pedal-Force and Pedal-Displacement Levels

Car Racing in a Simulator: Validation and Assessment of Brake Pedal Stiffness

“…Previous manual control experiments have also shown that humans are able to effectively adapt their behavior across a wide range of control display gains (Casiez, Vogel, Balakrishnan, & Cockburn, 2008;Huysmans, De Looze, Hoozemans, Van der Beek, & Van Dieën, 2006;McRuer & Jex, 1967;Van Doorn, Unema, & Hendriks, 2005). Our results resemble those of Segel and Mortimer (1970) who systematically varied the brake pedal stiffness of a passenger car with an unassisted braking system, while keeping the deceleration versus pedal displacement function constant (i.e., a position control pedal). Their results also showed that drivers were highly adaptable to varying pedal configurations.…”

“…The minimum stopping distance depended predominantly on the individual driver capabilities, initial speed, and surface friction coefficient, and not as much on the pedal stiffness, even though the latter was varied by over a factor of 16. Contrary to the work of Segel and Mortimer (1970), however, this study investigated the effect of pedal stiffness while keeping the deceleration/pedal-force gain constant. In other words, the force needed for the driver to decelerate the car remained identical while the pedal displacements varied (i.e., a force control pedal).…”

“…This may provide a more fair comparison between varying levels of stiffness, because the physical effort of the driver remains constant. Segel and Mortimer (1970) found an optimum deceleration/pedal-force gain for a given grip level of the tire-road interface, and it would be interesting to investigate whether other gains (i.e., by increasing or decreasing the brake pedal force necessary to decelerate the vehicle) cause a performance improvement or decrement. A higher deceleration/pedal-force gain would result in less required effort, but also less proprioceptive feedback, whereas oppositely, a lower deceleration/ pedal-force gain would result in more physical effort and more proprioceptive feedback.…”

Understanding and Modeling the Human Driver

“…The parameter t was an effective transport time delay. More specific studies aimed at understanding the human as an automobile driver [16,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] followed from or paralleled this type of manual control work. One example is a series of publications by Rashevsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s that addressed the topic of ''Mathematical Biology of Automobile Driving'' [25] wherein the basic model of the driver as a steering controller was treated in a purely geometric/ kinematic manner.…”

“…More complete treatments of the driver modeling effort and associated measurements of driver-vehicle system responses were also emerging in this same time frame, particularly with the increased use of computers and driving simulators. Example works that studied driver control behavior and accounted for the dynamics of the vehicle include studies by Wierwille [19], McRuer [22], Weir [18,[29][30][31], Kondo [17], Yoshimoto [20] as well as many others [16,[26][27][28][34][35][36][37]. Key findings from these studies and others that followed are discussed further in subsequent sections of the paper.…”