交通模型的假设正确性分析

An International Driving Simulator

- Recognizing the Sense of a Car Body by the Simulator- Shinya Saito, Yoshitoshi Murata, Tsuyoshi Takayama, Nobuyoshi Sato Graduate School of Software and Information Science

Iwate Prefectural University Graduate School

Takizawa, Japan

g231j017@s.iwate-pu.ac.jp, {y-murata, takayama, nobu-s}@iwate-pu.ac.jp

Abstract—It is difficult to drive smoothly when overseas because of in tern ation al differen ces in traffic rules or car configurations. To solve this problem, we developed a driving simulator for practicing driving under different road and car con figuration s. For the roads in the simulator, we extracted road data from Google Maps, made 3D roads, an d added traffic rules. We examin ed the in fluen ce on a driver of the difference between driving right- and left-hand drive cars, and whether the driver can obtain a sen se of right- and left-han d drivin g on the simulator. Experimen tal results usin g the simulator clarified the differen ce in in fluen ce between right- and left-hand drive cars. We found that Japanese who usually drive a right-hand drive car in left-hand traffic ten d to cross lane lines when driving a left-hand drive car.

Keywords-international driving simulator; sense of car body; 3D road

I.INTRODUCTION

Opportunities and the ability to go abroad are increasing in modern society, accelerating internationalization. Travelers sometimes have to drive themselves while overseas, such as during a business trip. It is difficult for travelers who are not familiar with driving overseas to drive smoothly there because of differences in the structure of the roads, traffic rules, car configurations, and the driver’s own habits between the home country and foreign countries. For example, in Japan, when a traffic light is red and there is no special traffic sign, going straight is obviously prohibited, but turning right or left is also prohibited. However, in the USA, unless there is a “No Turn on Red” traffic sign, even if a traffic light is red, turning right is permitted. Differences in traffic rules may confuse visiting drivers and prevent smooth and safe driving. These traffic rules are conveyed through traffic signs. However, these signs are not globally standardized. For example, the U.S. System presents traffic rules in words. In contrast, the E uropean system presents them in pictures. Thus, with only traffic signs, it is difficult for visitors to understand the traffic rules immediately.

Differences in the car configuration, such as left- or right-hand drive, and in the side of the road to keep to affect visiting drivers. Reference [5] discusses situations in which vehicles tend to cross a traffic lane in right-hand traffic through experiments with Japanese drivers. However, the effect of differences in the driving configuration of the car is not investigated.

Driving practice on a driving simulator would help drivers become accustomed to driving overseas. E xisting driving simulators are mostly for obtaining a driver’s license [1], developing new vehicles [2], and analyzing driver behaviors [3][4]. A driving simulator that supports drivers in driving overseas is not currently available.

A driving simulator that can simulate roads and traffic rules in foreign countries for travelers to practice driving beforehand would be useful. Thus, we developed such a simulator; travelers can then practice driving under different road and car configurations in advance.

First, we describe how we implemented 3D roads in and added traffic rules to our simulator in Section II. Then, experiments on whether a driver can recognize the difference between left- and right-hand drive on our simulator are explained in Section III. The results of experiments investigating the influence of different car configurations on drivers are presented in Section IV. The paper is concluded and further research is described in Sections V and VI respectively.

II.DEVELOPING DRIVING SIMULATOR To express real roads as 3D polygons, dedicated data about the real roads must be extracted. Existing methods to express real roads include using road data created by a government or a local government, using digital road map databases, and using data measured by a special vehicle mounted with cameras [6]. However, these methods are costly and hardly for this study, because this study needs many road data around the world. In addition, methods that extract road data by image understanding [7] are inflexible. We used a lower cost method for expressing roads. An outline of our developed system is shown in Figure 1. In this system, road data are extracted from Google Maps, since Google Maps has aerial photographs, Street View, the Google Maps API, and a function for 3D views in Google E arth. Moreover, Google Maps has maps of every country in the world. To learn overseas traffic rules, we created a function that decides whether the simulator user has broken a traffic rule in real time by adding traffic rule information to the road data. Therefore, virtual driving under foreign

2012 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops