Objective Evaluation Method of Steering Comfort Based on Movement Quality Evaluation of Driver Steering Maneuver

摘要

The existing research of steering comfort mainly focuses on the subjective evaluation, aiming at designing and optimizing the steering system. In the development of steering system, especially the evaluation of steering comfort, the objective evaluation methods considered the kinematic characteristics of driver steering maneuver are not proposed, which means that the objective evaluation of steering cannot be conducted with the evaluation of kinematic characteristics of driver in steering maneuver. In order to propose the objective evaluation methods of steering comfort, the evaluation of steering movement quality of driver is developed on the basis of the study of the kinematic characteristics of steering maneuver. First, the steering motion trajectories of the driver in both comfortable and certain extreme uncomfortable operation conditions are detected using the Vicon motion capture system. The operation conditions are under the restrictions of the vertical height and horizontal distance between steering wheel center and the H-point of driver, and the steering resisting torque else. Next, the movement quality evaluation of driver steering maneuver is assessed using twelve kinds of evaluation indices based on the kinematic analyses of the steering motion trajectories to propose an objective evaluation method. Finally, an integrated discomfort index of steering maneuver is proposed on the basis of the regression analysis of subjective evaluation rating and the movement quality evaluation indices, including the Jerk, Discomfort and Joint Torque indices. The test results show that the proposed integrated discomfort index gives a good fitting with the subjective evaluation of discomfort, which means it can be used to evaluate or predict the discomfort level of steering maneuver. This paper proposes an objective evaluation method of steering comfort based on the movement quality evaluation of driver steering maneuver.