Realism is a very sought feature in interactive driving simulators for traffic studies, since a nonrealistic simulation could produce non-realistic human drivers behaviours. Since cars driven by artificial intelligence (AI) are one of the main components of a traffic simulation, they play an important role in making up the overall sense of realism. A good understanding of how the AI influences human drivers is thus important in avoiding biases in traffic studies with simulators, and might also come useful in simulators for traffic education, in order to induce certain behaviours in the students. The purpose of this study was to build a driving simulation with multiple AI-driven cars, and let human testers use it, in order to analyse if and how a more polite lane-change behaviour, a more realistic lateral alignment, and a slower average speed affect the perception and the behaviour of human drivers. The simulator was developed upon low-cost hardware infrastructure previously used for other traffic studies. Since the existing software is very specific and hard to modify, a new simulation software was built from scratch for this study, using the Unity3D engine and implementing design patterns developed in previous studies, in order to produce a more flexible and modifiable infrastructure than what had been done in the past studies. The test subjects gave a generally good feedback on the simulator as a whole, and cars which politely changed lanes were regarded as behaving in a slightly more realistic way. Some insights were also obtained about user perception, mainly consisting in a difficulty in perceiving absolute speeds, whereas relative speeds were estimated more accurately.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:his-8457 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Franco, Giulio |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för kommunikation och information |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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