A Method for Analyzing Foot Placement during Moments of Vehicle Ingress and Egress

摘要

A variety of studies have been conducted to analyze motion patterns of vehicle ingress and egress. These studies usually focused on full body dynamical analysis. However, there are few studies on step posture in vehicle ingress/egress. This study aims to find a standard step posture in vehicle ingress /egress. This study proposes a systematic methodology that derives standard foot placement in vehicle ingress/egress. Subjects performed ingress/egress tasks in this study. We calculated step position data involving toe position and heel position with step analysis. We also calculated the step angle between the vehicle and user using this step position data. Based on a frequency distribution histogram with 10 degree angle range, we derived the representative angle range in which almost fifty percent of the subjects stepped. We divided the subjects in the representative angle range into representative subjects. We then calculated the representative step positions and angles from the mean data of representative subjects. These representative step positions and angles correspond to the general ingress / egress step property of users. This study applied this method to a recreational vehicle (RV) case. Forty subjects performed RV ingress / egress tasks. Subjects were separated into four groups according to physical characteristics such as stature in order to derive the step properties of groups. The results show that shorter subjects get in the vehicle from the close position than high height subjects. The step angles, however, are the same for all groups. This study proposes a method to find the first step position of ingress and the end step position of egress between vehicles and users. The results are useful for realistic simulation of human step posture in vehicle configuration design.