title: A two-point visual control model of steering.
abstract: When steering down a winding road, drivers have been shown to use both near and far regions of the road for guidance during steering. We propose a model of steering that explicitly embodies this idea, using both a 'near point' to maintain a central lane position and a 'far point' to account for the upcoming roadway. Unlike control models that integrate near and far information to compute curvature or more complex features, our model relies solely on one perceptually plausible feature of the near and far points, namely the visual direction to each point. The resulting parsimonious model can be run in simulation within a realistic highway environment to facilitate direct comparison between model and human behavior. Using such simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed two-point model is able to account for four interesting aspects of steering behavior: curve negotiation with occluded visual regions, corrective steering after a lateral drift, lane changing, and individual differences.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. salvucci@cs.drexel.edu
authors.forename: Dario D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Salvucci
authors.forename: Rob
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Gray
mesh_terms: D001334:Automobile Driving; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009949:Orientation; D011601:Psychophysics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*