Avoiding Motion Sickness for Automated Driving Cars

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Steffen Müller; Dr. Uwe Schönfeld
• Subject Area: Traffic and Transport Systems, Intelligent and Automated Traffic
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416914220

Automated vehicles with level 3 or higher do not need constant supervision by the driver anymore. Thus, new usage and interior concepts are possible. However, alternative activities and new seating positions increase the risk of motion sickness. This diminishes the benefit of automated driving and increases the risk of an accident when the driver takes over the driving responsibility since motion sickness affects the driving ability. It is already known, that the risk of motion sickness increases in the case of translational accelerations with frequencies between 0.05 and 0.3Hz. However, it has not been investigated yet if there is a range of acceleration amplitudes, which is in general not or only slightly inducing motion sickness. The influence of rotational motion and actions to suppress this motion have not been thoroughly investigated, either. Despite of clearly different individual motion sickness susceptibility the influence of the physiology on motion sickness is still an unsolved problem and is not considered in numerical models to simulate motion sickness. Moreover, it is unknown which objective criteria describe the degree of motion sickness. Since these research questions are still not answered, they are the main topics in the research proposal on hand. Three experimental studies for the investigation of the influence of horizontal acceleration amplitudes and rotational motion on motion sickness will be conducted. The first study investigates the influence of longitudinal motion und pitching during braking and accelerating with an experimental car with active suspension and damping. The second study deals with the influence of lateral motion and rolling during a lane change maneuver with the same car. During the third study, it is investigated with a car with active rear steering how yaw motion influences motion sickness. In all three studies, the seating direction is altered and it is examined how suppressing the rotational motion or motion compensation by an active motion seat can help avoiding motion sickness. Moreover, the test persons are categorized with respect to motion susceptibility by off-vertical axis rotation experiments, physiological parameters are measured, the facial expression is traced and individual characteristics of the vestibular organ are identified by reflex measurements. These experiments investigate the individual influence of the vestibular organ on motion sickness. For the emulation of these correlations a numerical simulation model is developed and it is analyzed how motion sickness can be evaluated by objective criteria using physiological parameters and facial expressions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Annett Pudszuhn