Human Sensibility Ergonomics Approach to Vehicle Simulator Based on Dynamics ∗

Simulators have been used to evaluate drivers’ reactions to various transportation products. Most research, however, has concentrated on their technical performance. This paper considers driver’s motion perception on a vehicle simulator through the analysis of human sensibility ergonomics. A sensibility ergonomic method is proposed in order to improve the reliability of vehicle simulators. A simulator in a passenger vehicle consists of three main modules such as vehicle dynamics, virtual environment, and motion representation modules. To evaluate drivers’ feedback, human perceptions are categorized into a set verbal expressions collected and investigated to find the most appropriate ones for translation and angular accelerations of the simulator. The cut-off frequency of the washout filter in the representation module is selected as one sensibility factor. Sensibility experiments were carried out to find a correlation between the expressions and the cut-off frequency of the filter. This study suggests a methodology to obtain an ergonomic database that can be applied to the sensibility evaluation of dynamic simulators.