NISSAN Project
From spring 2002, Nissan Motor Company and Delft University of Technology cooperated in order to design an advanced driver support system for active car-following support based on response automation. This has led to a gas pedal that continuously offers haptic feedback (Abbink, 2006; Mulder, 2007). The studies of Abbink and Mulder revealed that drivers benefit from continuous haptic support system through small improvements in car-following performance with significant reductions in control activity.
Nissan Motor Company brought the haptic gas pedal system, named "Distance Control Assist", on the market in 2006. It is currently available in Japan and the USA in their Infinity brand.
A more recent focus is on lateral driver assistance to improve safety and comfort during curve negotiation. A new research question of Nissan Motor Company is if drivers will benefit in a similar way for a continuous lateral haptic support. This type of feedback requires an active control system to supply lateral haptic guidance. However, contrary to the gas pedal, with conventional steering wheels the human driver already feels inherent force feedback because the tires and the steering wheel are mechanically coupled.
Given the development of steer-by-wire, the designer is now able to choose the presentation of forces during curve negation, e.g. only natural force feedback, only guidance feed-forward or both. It is expected that conflict situations may occur when presenting both actual tire state information and enhanced guiding cues through the steering wheel. One could think of the situation where the driver is supposed to steer to the right while the preview forces indicate that an opposite curve is ahead. What will happen to the driver’s response?
Solid conclusions on the driver interaction with the steering wheel are missing in literature. Therefore human interaction with steer-by-wire is investigated in a fixed-base car simulator through experiments to make implementation of the continuous haptic Driver Support System (DSS) successful.
