Guided Control of Human Drivers: Control Design and Experiments

This brief investigates the guidance of a human driver via an automated lead vehicle, when the automated vehicle is not only responding to a reference velocity but it also takes into account the speed of the subsequent human-driven vehicle (HV). To verify the theoretical results, a human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation environment is developed, in which a graphical interface illustrates the automated vehicle ahead, while the human operator controls the velocity of the following vehicle via the accelerator and brake pedals. Nine human drivers were involved in the experiments, each of them carried out the driving task for 79 control gain combinations of the automated vehicle. Based on the measurement data, the parameters of the human driver model were estimated using the sweeping least squares method; the measurement results confirmed the applicability of the theoretical model in designing advanced traffic control strategies.