ACE DRIVING SIMULATOR AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO EVALUATE DRIVER INTERFACES. IN: HUMAN FACTORS IN DRIVING, SEATING AND VISION

A fixed base driving simulator, operating procedure and software system have been developed by a team of automotive suppliers. The system is designed to provide quick feedback to the product designers in early concept generation and validation phases of new automotive human-machine interface (HMI) architecture strategies and interfaces of in-vehicle devices. This paper presents a description of the simulator system, illustrations on its evaluation performance and results of two experiments conducted to evaluate different radio designs by involving different radio and non-radio tasks (such as increase/decrease radio volume, eject a CD and insert a new CD, answer a cell phone, dial a telephone number, etc.). The simulator consists of a reconfigurable cab with quick-change attachments to mount various controls and displays in package positions. A number of drivers are asked to drive the simulator and perform a number of tasks when prompted by pre-recorded voice commands. The entire data collection and data analysis procedure is developed such that new experiments can be configured, implemented and analyzed quickly and with the least amount of a human analyst's involvement. The system generates reports showing graphs of driver behavior, performance measures, and subjective impressions of drivers for different tasks associated in operating/using various in-vehicle controls and displays. Findings show that the simulator and the HMI evaluation process provide a very powerful method to evaluate tasks associated with new in-vehicle devices and to compare the measures obtained from tests with similar data obtained from the evaluation of other in-vehicle devices.