Name: tactile vibrating toolkit and driving simulation platform for driving-related research
Uploaded: 2020-12-18T14:00:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Tactile Vibrating Toolkit and Driving Simulation Platform for Driving-Related Research at JoVE.com

This project has been sponsored by Beijing Talents Foundation.

NOTE: All methods described here have been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Tsinghua University and informed consent was obtained from all participants.
1. Participants
<ol>
	<li>Conduct a power analysis to calculate the required number of participants for recruitment according to the experimental design to achieve statistical power.</li>
	<li>Balance the gender of the participants during recruitment as much as possible.</li>
	<li>Ensure that participants have a valid driv...

     

The driving simulation platform&#160;and vibrating toolkit&#160;reasonably mimicked the application of potential wearable vibrotactile devices in real life, providing an effective technique in investigating driving-related research. With the use of this technology, a safe experimental environment with high configurability and affordability is now available for conducting research that is comparable to real-world driving.
There are several steps that require more attention. Firstly, during the ...

An erratum was issued for:&#160;<a href="https://www.jove.com/t/61408">Tactile Vibrating Toolkit and Driving Simulation Platform for Driving-Related Research</a>. The Authors section was&#160;updated.
Ao Zhu1 
Annebella Tsz Ho Choi1 
Ko-Hsuan Ma1 
Shi Cao2 
Han Yao1 
Jian Wu3 
Jibo He4,1 
1Psychology Department, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University 
2Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo 
3Haier Innovation Design Center, Haier Company 
4Psychology Department, School of Education and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering
to:
Ao Zhu1 
Annebella Tsz Ho Choi1 
Ko-Hsuan Ma1 
Shi Cao2 
Han Yao1 
Jian Wu3 
Jibo He1 
1Psychology Department, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University 
2Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo 
3Haier Innovation Design Center, Haier Company

An erratum was issued for:&#160;<a href="https://www.jove.com/t/61408">Tactile Vibrating Toolkit and Driving Simulation Platform for Driving-Related Research</a>. The Authors section was&#160;updated.

Erratum: Tactile Vibrating Toolkit and Driving Simulation Platform for Driving-Related Research

According to the data revealed by the Global Health Estimates in 2016, traffic injury is the eighth cause of global deaths, leading to 1.4 million deaths worldwide1. In the year 2018, 39.2% of the traffic accidents were collisions with motor vehicles in transport, and 7.2% of which were rear-end collisions. A solution to increase vehicle and road safety is the development of an advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) to warn drivers with potential hazards. Data has shown that ADAS can greatly reduce the rate of rear-end collisions, and it is even more effective when equipped with an auto brake system2. In addition, with the development of autonomous vehicles, less human involvement will be required to control the vehicle, making a take-over request (TOR) warning system a necessity when the autonomous vehicle fails to regulate itself. The design of ADAS and TOR warning system is now an important piece of technology for drivers to avoid imminent accidents within a few seconds. The exemplar experiment used a vibrating toolkit along with a driving simulation platform to investigate which location would generate the best outcome when a vibrotactile warning system has been used as a potential ADAS and TOR warning system.
Categorized by perceptual channels, there are generally three types of warning modalities, that is visual, auditory, and tactile. Each warning modality&#160;has its own merits and limitations. When visual warning systems are in use, drivers can suffer from visual overload3, impairing driving performances due to inattentional blindness4,5. Although an auditory warning system does not influence drivers&#39; visual field, its effectiveness greatly depends on the surroundings such as background music and other noises in the driving environment6,7. Thus, situations that contain other external auditory information or significant noise may lead to inattentional deafness8,9, reducing the effectiveness of an auditory warning system. In comparison, tactile warning systems do not compete with drivers&#8217; visual or auditory processing. By sending vibrotactile warnings to drivers, tactile warning systems overcome the limitations of visual and auditory warning systems.
Previous studies showed that tactile warnings can benefit drivers by shortening their brake response time. It was also found that tactile warning systems yield a more effective result over visual10,11 and auditory12,13,14 warning systems in certain situations. However, limited research has focused on investigating the optimal location for placing a tactile warning device. According to sensory cortex hypothesis15 and sensory distance hypothesis16, the exemplar study chose the finger, wrist, and temple areas as the experimental locations for placing a tactile warning device. With the introduced protocol, the frequency and delivering time of a vibrating warning, and intervals between vibrations of the vibrating toolkit, can be configured to fit the experimental requirements. This vibrating toolkit consisted of a master chip, a voltage regulator chip, a multiplexer, a USB to Transistor-Transistor-Logic (TTL) adapter, a Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET), and a Bluetooth module. The number of vibrating modules can also vary according to researchers&#8217; needs, with up to four modules vibrating at the same time. When implementing the vibrating toolkit in the driving-related experiments, it can be configured to fit the experimental settings as well as synchronized with driving performance data by revising the codes of the driving simulation.
While for researchers, conducting a driving experiment on a virtual platform is more feasible than in the real world due to the risk and cost involved. For instance, collecting performance indicators can be difficult, and it is hard to control the environmental factors involved when experiments are being conducted in the real-world. As a result, many studies have used fixed-base driving simulators running on PCs in recent years as an alternative to conduct on-road driving studies. After learning, developing, and researching for over 11 years in the driving research community, we established a driving simulation platform with a real car that consists of an open-source driving simulation software and a hardware kit, including a steering wheel and gearbox, three pedals, three mounted projectors, and three projector screens. With the driving simulation software supports only a single screen, the presented protocol used only the central projector and projector screen to conduct the experiment.
There are two major advantages of using the presented driving simulation platform. One advantage of this platform is that it uses an open-source software. Using the user-friendly open-source platform, researchers can customize the simulation and vibrating toolkit for their unique research needs by making simple software configuration without any code development&#160;. By revising the codes, researchers can create driving simulations that provide relative fidelity to the reality with plenty of options available on car types, road types, resistance of the steering wheel, lateral and longitudinal wind turbulence, time and brake event application program interfaces (APIs) for external software synchronization, and implementation of the behavioral paradigms such as car-following task and N-Back task. Although conducting driving-related research in a driving simulator cannot fully replicate driving in the real world, data collected through a driving simulator is reasonable and has been widely adopted by researchers17,18.
Another advantage of the proposed driving simulator is its low cost. As mentioned previously, the introduced driving simulation software is an open-source software that is available to users free of charge. In addition, the total cost of the whole hardware setup in this protocol is lower compare to typical high-fidelity commercial driving simulators. Figure 1 a and b show the complete setup of two driving simulators with the cost ranging from $3000 to $30000. In contrast, typical high-fidelity commercial driving simulators (fixed-base) usually cost around $10,000 to $100,000. With its highly affordable price, this driving simulator can be a popular choice not only for academic research purposes, but also for conducting driving classes19 and for demonstration of driving-related technologies20,21.
<img alt="Figure 1" class="xfigimg" src="/files/ftp_upload/61408/61408fig1v2.jpg" /> 
Figure 1: An image of the driving simulators.&#160;Both driving simulators consisted of a steering wheel and gearbox, three pedals, and a vehicle. (a) A $3000 driving simulator setup that used an 80-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 3840 &#215; 2160. (b) A $30000 driving simulator setup that used three mounted projectors and three projector screens with a dimension of 223 x 126 cm each. The projection screens were placed 60 cm above ground and 22 cm away from the front of the vehicle. Only the central projector and projector screen were used for the current experiment. <a href="https://www.jove.com/files/ftp_upload/61408/61408fig1v2large.jpg" target="_blank">Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.</a>
The driving simulation software and vibrating toolkit in the proposed method have already been used in previous studies by our researchers22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29. This self-developed vibrating toolkit following the ISO standard30 can be applied in different fields31,32 by adjusting the vibration frequency and intensity. It is important to note that a newer version of the vibrating toolkit has been developed and is introduced in the following protocol. Instead of adjusting the vibration frequency using an adjustable voltage adapter, the newer version is equipped with five different vibration frequencies and can be easier adjusted using the codes provided in Supplemental Coding File 1. Moreover, the presented driving simulator provides researchers with a safe, inexpensive, and effective way to investigate various kinds of driving-related research. Thus, this protocol is suitable for research laboratories that have a limited budget and have a strong need to customize experimental driving environments.

<table border="1" fo:keep-together.within-page="1" fo:keep-with-next.within-page="always">
	<tbody>
		<tr >
			<td >Logitech G29</td>
			<td >Logitech</td>
			<td >941-000114</td>
			<td >Steering wheel and pedals</td>
		</tr>
		<tr >
			<td >Projector screens</td>
			<td >-</td>
			<td >-</td>
			<td>The projector screen for showing the simulation enivronemnt.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr >
			<td >Epson CB-700U Laser WUXGA Education Ultra Short Focus Interactive Projector</td>
			<td >EPSON</td>
			<td >V11H878520W</td>
			<td>The projector model for generating the display of the simlution enivronment.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr >
			<td >The Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS)</td>
			<td >-</td>
			<td >None</td>
			<td>Driving simulation software. The original creators are Eric Espi&#233; and Christophe Guionneau, and the version used in experiment is modified by Cao, Shi.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr >
			<td >Tactile toolkit</td>
			<td >Hao Xing Tech.</td>
			<td >None</td>
			<td>This is used to initiate warnings to the participants.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr >
			<td >Connecting program (Python)</td>
			<td >-</td>
			<td >-</td>
			<td>This is used to connect the TORCS with the tactile toolkit to send the vibrating instruction.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr >
			<td >G*power</td>
			<td >Heinrich-Heine-Universit&#228;t D&#252;sseldorf</td>
			<td >None</td>
			<td>This software is used to calculate the required number of participants.</td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

tactile vibrating toolkit and driving simulation platform for driving-related research

Collision warning system plays a key role in the prevention of driving distractions and drowsy driving. Previous studies have proven the advantages of tactile warnings in reducing driver&#8217;s brake response time. At the same time, tactile warnings have been proved effective in take-over request (TOR) for partially autonomous vehicles.
How the performance of tactile warnings can be optimized is an ongoing hot research topic in this field. Thus, the presented low-cost driving simulation software and methods are introduced to attract more researchers to take part in the investigation. The presented protocol has been divided into five sections: 1) participants, 2) driving simulation software configuration, 3) driving simulator preparation, 4) vibrating toolkit configuration and preparation, and 5) conducting the experiment.
In the exemplar study, participants wore the tactile vibrating toolkit and performed an established car-following task using the customized driving simulation software. The front vehicle braked intermittently, and vibrating warnings were delivered whenever the front vehicle was braking. Participants were instructed to respond as quickly as possible to the sudden brakes of the front vehicle. Driving dynamics, such as the brake response time and brake response rate, were recorded by the simulation software for data analysis.
The presented protocol offers insight into the exploration of the effectiveness of tactile warnings on different body locations. In addition to the car-following task that is demonstrated in the exemplar experiment, this protocol also provides options&#160;to apply other paradigms to the driving simulation studies by making simple software configuration without any code development. However, it is important to note that due to its affordable price, the driving simulation software and hardware introduced here may not be able to fully compete with other high-fidelity commercial driving simulators. Nevertheless, this protocol can act as an affordable and user-friendly alternative to the general high-fidelity commercial driving simulators.

The exemplar study reported in this paper conducted&#160;the car-following task using the driving simulator and vibrating toolkit, which has also been published previously in an academic journal22. It is noteworthy that the older version of the vibrating toolkit was used when conducting the exemplar study, while a new version of the vibrating toolkit was introduced in the above protocol. The study was a within-subject design experiment with vibrating warning location as the only factor: finger, wr...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Tactile Vibrating Toolkit and Driving Simulation Platform for Driving-Related Research at JoVE.com

Tactile Vibrating Toolkit and Driving Simulation Platform for Driving-Related Research

This protocol describes a driving simulation platform and a tactile vibrating toolkit for the investigation of driving-related research. An exemplar experiment exploring the effectiveness of tactile warnings is also presented.&#160;

Collision warning system plays a key role in the prevention of driving distractions and drowsy driving. Previous studies have proven the advantages of ...

Our protocol provides researcher a very adaptable platform and tools for investigating the benefits and the effectiveness of the application of tactile devices, especially for in-vehicle warning system. This vibrating toolkit provides a safe, inexpensive, and effective technique for investigating various kinds of driving-related research. This method can also be used to conduct other human behavioral studies.This protocol has provided insight into the potential application of smart wearable devices in promoting driving safety. To configure the driving simulation software for an experiment, open the folder of the driving simulation software, the runtime folder, and the config folder. Open the expconfig.txt file and make any adjustments to the default settings of the driving simulation as necessary, according to the experimental design. Configure the UDP settings if a UDP data transfer is required for the experiment, and use true or false to allow the timestamp data synchronization to a specific local network IP address, via the enableUDPSendData option, to determine whether to enable the UDP for data transfer. Then specify each section of the IP address using the commands as indicated, to define the IP address for the UDP transfer.To set up the driving simulator, connect the steering wheel, three mounted projectors, and three projector screens to the computer. Place the projector screens 60 centimeters above the ground, and 22 centimeters away from the front of the instrumented vehicle Select options and display to set the screen resolution to match the screen size upon starting the driving simulation software. Then, on the configure page, select a player, and follow the instructions provided by the software, to calibrate the steering wheel, accelerator, and brake pedal.To configure the vibrating toolkit, connect the toolkit to the power supply and switch on the toolkit. Connect the toolkit to the computer via Bluetooth, and complete a pilot skin sensitivity test, to define the vibrating frequency to be used for the experiment. Then use the codes as indicated to set the vibrating frequency to 70 Hertz, and to synchronize the brake events from the simulation software and vibrating toolkit.To conduct a driving simulation experiment, after obtaining informed consent, help the participant adjust the seat distance to the pedal, and to set the back rest to a comfortable position. Inform the participant how to operate the simulator including the steering wheel, brake pedal, and accelerator pedal, and show the participant the roadmap that will be used for the driving simulation. Inform the participant that they should drive as they would in the real world while following the car in front of them and keeping a two second headway behind it, and instruct the participant to brake as soon as possible, Whenever the front vehicle brakes, even if the scenario does not require a brake response.Have the participant complete a five-minute practice trial that includes a set of five random brakes to learn how to maintain a two second headway distance behind the front vehicle. During the practice trial, if the participant is between 2.25 to 2.5 seconds behind the front vehicle, the driving simulation software will play a prompt with a female voice saying, Too far, please speed up"Too far, please speed up. If the participant is less than 1.5 seconds behind the front vehicle, the driving simulation software will play a prompt with a female voice saying, Too close, please slow down"Too close, please slow down.When the participant has completed the practice session, and can maintain a stable following distance, let the participant know that the study can be stopped without any penalty, by notifying the experimenters at any time as necessary. Inform the participant of the location that the vibrating toolkit will be placed before each block begins, and use medical tape to assist the participant in putting on the toolkit. Inform the participant that the toolkit will vibrate to warn the participant to brake, when the front vehicle is braking, and have the participant begin the first trial.Give the participant a two minute rest upon the completion of each block to reduce any carry-over effects. When all of the trials have been completed, have the participant indicate their preference for, and the vibration intensity, at each location of the toolkit, on a scale of one to seven, and record the usage rate of each of the participant's daily wearable accessories. In this representative analysis, the driving simulation experiment took place in a bright environment, with the simulated scene designed to appear similar to driving on the highway on a clear day.Post-talk analyses using pairwise Bonferroni-corrected T-tests, indicated no significant pairwise comparison differences in the brake response rates between task conditions. As illustrated, the application of tactile warnings could facilitate drivers'reactions towards upcoming hazards while driving, especially when the warning device was located on the driver's finger or wrist. Interestingly, while participants perceived the highest level of vibration in the temple area, the preference for the vibrating toolkit to be located at the temple area was the lowest.In addition, the fact that over 50%of the participants wore a watch in their everyday life, suggests the feasibility of adopting wearable vibrotactile devices as a warning system in real life. Instead of performing the car-following task, researchers can perform an impact task to investigate the cognitive effects of tactile violence simply by activating the option in the protocol

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