Truck drivers braking and glance behaviour during interaction with VRUs (TRUBADUR)
Project A-0038 within SAFER's Open Research at AstaZero Program.
The improvement of road safety has been defined as a priority for the development of a sustainable society by the United Nations, the European Commission and the Swedish Transport Administration. However, there are still approximately 26,000 road fatalities occurring every year on European roads and 15% of these fatalities happen in crashes where Heavy Good Vehicles (HGV) are involved. Crashes with Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) occur less often than crashes with passenger cars and commercial vehicles, but the consequences for the VRUs in these crashes are extremely serious, due to the weight difference and therefore higher energy transfer. In this context, the current project aims to provide more insight about HGV drivers’ glance location and consequent reactions during the interaction with VRUs in crossing situations at intersections.
Despite crash databases contain a substantial amount of crashes, little information is collected about the behaviour of drivers and VRUs in the pre-crash and crash phase. This information is important for the development of active safety systems (e.g. Forward Collision Warning, Autonomous Emergency Braking, Blind Spot Detection) which could avoid crashes or mitigate their consequences. Then, the current project aims to develop driver models that enhance the current algorithms of active safety systems. Besides, the results of the project will be published in relevant peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
The participants will be requested to drive multiple rounds in the city area of the AstaZero test track with an instrumented truck, provided by REVERE lab. During the drives in the city area, some unexpected interactions with VRUs will occur at intersections. The project will collect kinematic variables (e.g. speed), variables describing drivers’ visual behaviour (e.g. glance location) and drivers’ personal information (e.g. age). In order to ensure the safest experimental design, the vulnerable road users will be pedestrian and cyclist dummies installed on a rig fully controlled by the research engineers.
