Driver models for automated driving

Research Project, 2018 – 2019

Today, automated driving (AD) is one of the most challenging issue in transportation. AD promises to increase safety and mobility while presenting serious new challenges in engineering and human factors. Autonomous driving is a priority in the research agenda of VINNOVA, Trafikverket and Energimyndigheten. The local industry is also committed to autonomous driving: 100 autonomous vehicles will soon drive in Göteborg in the DRIVE ME project, and Autoliv and VCC recently joined efforts in a new company to develop autonomous vehicles.

At Chalmers, several AD projects started at different departments and across different Areas of Advance. In the FFI project QUADRAE, Chalmers teams with VCC and Autoliv to develop driver models and a simulation framework to estimate safety benefit for L2/L3 automation. QUADRAE will support the development of automation by providing a framework for counterfactual simulation to determine how drivers may respond when automation fails or in unexpected situations, which automation is not able to handle. In addition, Chalmers leads the FFI project COPPLAR that aims at developing an autonomous vehicle to connect the Lindholmen and Johanneberg campuses. Other AD projects at Chalmers address different human factors and engineering issue in AD.

The aim for this post-doc application is to grant cooperation and synergies across AD projects at Chalmers. This post-doc will be financed 50% from QUADRAE and is intended to expand the work in QUADRAE on AD, by leveraging on opportunities from other projects such as COPPLAR. As an example, COPPLAR would be a perfect platform to verify and further develop driver monitoring and driver models algorithms from QUADRAE, whereas COPPLAR itself could benefit from the algorithms and methodologies developed in QUADRAE to achieve its goal. The synergy between QUADRAE and COPPLAR will facilitate cooperation and cross-fertilization between Applied Mechanics and Computer Science / Signals and Systems as well as between the Area of Advance of Transport and ICT.