Towards Cognitive Vehicles

The recent decades have witnessed a fast rising number of motor vehicles. As a result traffic becomes more congested and streets become more risky. Temptations of widely varied communication and entertainment applications even make drivers more over-burdened and distracted. To relieve the continually increasing stress of drivers and reduce the number of accidents, current intelligent vehicle research has a new trend emphasizing driver understanding and modeling. This paper provides a survey of recent works of cognitive vehicles with a force on driver-oriented models and methods. Two major directions are discussed: 1) modeling drivers as human being in a stimuli-decision-reaction mode, which focuses on the driver side; 2) improving perception, suggestion, and function delegation of traffic environment, which emphasizing on vehicle system side. The relationships of the recent models and methods are stated and related research challenges are listed. The applications of the driver-cognition models in intelligent vehicle control system are also introduced.