NSF Award
2332183
This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) funded project explores a new concept on how individual drivers behave during interactions with emergency vehicles (EV) in an experimental, virtual reality setting. Emergency vehicle response is critical to public health, and positive encounters with active emergency vehicles by drivers can both improve response time and reduce the risk of motor vehicle crashes. However, driver tendencies during these interactions are poorly understood, due to limited data availability and high dimensionality. This project designs and tests a novel approach that leverages data and insights from external sources (e.g., the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study and MCity 2.0) to validate experimental models. The success of this exploratory effort is likely to unlock opportunities for deriving a library of EV encounters from virtual reality simulator systems and other datasets. Additionally, realistic models of behaviors have the potential to advance microsimulation of emergency encounters and enable the systematic study of management strategies. The common method could also be applicable to other rare driving scenarios. <br/><br/>An adaptive scheme is developed and implemented in a virtual reality driving simulator experiment. This simulator emulates data during encounters with emergency vehicles in a controlled setting. The priors are updated with the result from microsimulation to identify scenarios offering the most information given the existing models. The collected data is then used to estimate drivers’ interactions with emergency vehicles including lane-changing behaviors, acceleration and braking, reaction time, awareness, and more. These elements are classified into reaction types by clustering of multivariate time series using the hidden Markov model. The validation involves a comparison of the developed models based on emulated data to features extracted from naturalistic driving data.<br/><br/>This project is jointly funded by Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
