Driving with a Haptic Guidance System in Degraded Visibility Conditions: Behavioral Analysis and Identification of a Two-Point Steering Control Model

The objective of this study is to determine the ability of a two-point steering control model to account for the influence of a haptic guidance system in different visibility conditions. For this purpose, the lateral control of the vehicle was characterized in terms of driving performance as well as through the identification of anticipation and compensation parameters of the driver model. The hypothesis is that if the structure of the model is valid in the considered conditions, the value of the parameters will change in coherence with the observed behavior. The results of an experiment conducted on a driving simulator demonstrate that the identified model can account for the cumulative influence of the haptic guidance system and degraded visibility. The anticipatory gain is sensitive to changes in driving conditions that have a direct influence on the produced trajectory, and the compensatory gain is sensitive to a decrease in the variability of the lateral position. However, a model with only the steering wheel angle as output is not able to determine whether the change in lateral position variability is due to the driver’s lack of anticipation or to the assistance provided by the haptic guidance system.