Creating a Virtual Environment for Practical Driving Tests

Abstract

From the point of view of road safety, it is necessary to focus the attention to the driver. Despite the increasingly popular topic of autonomous vehicles, the driver is still a central element of the transport system. Human in the transport system causes mistakes and failures that may result in traffic accidents. Testing drivers in real road traffic is in many ways difficult. It is time-consuming and also expensive, because it is necessary to have fully functional vehicle and lot of fuel. Last but not least, experimental drivers may get into dangerous situations in road traffic and there is also risk that they cause a traffic accident. Therefore this article deals with using of driving simulators for driver testing. Due to the limited use of current equipment in University Science Park, it also describes the simple modification of the training driving simulator to a light driving simulator. Simple rebuilding was done to exchange software to enable editing of the virtual environment. The paper describes the modelling of the virtual environment as well as the process of its testing and the initial results of research in the new environment. At the end of the paper are presented the initial results of the graphical recording of the driver’s activities together with accurate recording of the actual heart rate during the experimental driving in laboratory conditions.