Abstract
Simulators have been used to evaluate drivers'reactions to various transportation products. Most researches, however, have been concentrated on their technical performance, thus this paper considers drivers'senses of moving on a vehicle simulator through the analysis of human sensibility ergonomics. A sensibility ergonomic method is proposed in order to improve the faithfulness of vehicle simulators. A simulator of passenger vehicle consists of such three modules as vehicle dynamics, virtual environment, and motion representation modules. To evaluate drivers'feedback, human feelings are categorized into a set verbal expressions collected and investigated to find the most appropriate ones for translational and angular accelerations of the simulator The cutoff frequency of the washout alter ill the representation module is selected as one sensibility factor Sensibility experiments were carried out to find correlation between the expressions and the cut-off frequency of the filter. This study suggests a methodology to obtain an ergonomic database which can be applied to the sensibility evaluation of dynamic simulators.
