Study on Driver Emotion in Driver-Vehicle-Environment Systems Using Multiple Networked Driving Simulators

Driving simulators have been widely used to investigate driver behavior and psychophysiological responses. In this paper, we proposed to use multiple participant-operated driving simulators which communicate with each other so the platoon formed by the simulators can demonstrate realistic effects of driver-driver interaction in simulation scenarios. In our preliminary experiment, three driving simulators were connected through Northeastern’s campus network. One was a fixed-based high fidelity driving simulator with an actual automobile cabin and large curve screen in our Virtual Environments Laboratory. The other two are relative low cost simulators housed in the Intelligent Human-Machine Systems Laboratory. With this configuration, we investigated emotional behavior (anger, neutral, and excitation) of drivers by collecting driving performance data, psychophysiological responses and eye movement data. The results demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of using multiple networked driving simulators to study driver emotional behavior, e.g., road rage. DSC 2007 North America – Iowa City – September 2007