Advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) are primarily designed to increase driving safety and reduce traffic congestion without paying too much attention to passenger comfort or motion sickness. However, in view of autonomous cars, and taking into account that the lack of comfort and motion sickness increase in passengers, analysis from a comfort perspective is essential in the future car investigation. The aim of this work is to study in detail how passenger’s comfort evaluation parameters vary depending on the driving style, car or road. The database used has been developed by compiling the accelerations suffered by passengers when three drivers cruise two different vehicles on different types of routes. In order to evaluate both comfort and motion sickness, first, the numerical values of the main comfort evaluation variables reported in the literature have been analyzed. Moreover, a complementary statistical analysis of probability density and a power spectral analysis are performed. Finally, quantitative results are compared with passenger qualitative feedback. The results show the high dependence of comfort evaluation variables’ value with the road type. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the driving style and vehicle dynamics amplify or attenuate those values. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that contributions from longitudinal and lateral accelerations have a much greater effect in the lack of comfort than vertical ones. Finally, based on the concrete results obtained, a new experimental campaign is proposed.

Advanced driving-assistance systems (ADAS) are intended to automatize driver tasks, as well as improve driving and vehicle safety. This work proposes an intelligent neuro-fuzzy sensor for driving style (DS) recognition, suitable for ADAS enhancement. The development of the driving style intelligent sensor uses naturalistic driving data from the SHRP2 study, which includes data from a CAN bus, inertial measurement unit, and front radar. The system has been successfully implemented using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device of the Xilinx Zynq programmable system-on-chip (PSoC). It can mimic the typical timing parameters of a group of drivers as well as tune these typical parameters to model individual DSs. The neuro-fuzzy intelligent sensor provides high-speed real-time active ADAS implementation and is able to personalize its behavior into safe margins without driver intervention. In particular, the personalization procedure of the time headway (THW) parameter for an ACC in steady car following was developed, achieving a performance of 0.53 microseconds. This performance fulfilled the requirements of cutting-edge active ADAS specifications.

New challenges on transport systems are emerging due to the advances that the current paradigm is experiencing. The breakthrough of the autonomous car brings concerns about ride comfort, while the pollution concerns have arisen in recent years. In the model of automated automobiles, drivers are expected to become passengers, so, they will be more prone to suffer from ride discomfort or motion sickness. Conversely, the eco‐driving implications should not be set aside because of the influence of pollution on climate and people's health. For that reason, a joint assessment of the aforementioned points would have a positive impact. Thus, this work presents a self‐organised map‐based solution to assess ride comfort features of individuals considering their driving style from the viewpoint of eco‐driving. For this purpose, a previously acquired dataset from an instrumented car was used to classify drivers regarding the causes of their lack of ride comfort and eco‐friendliness. Once drivers are classified regarding their driving style, natural‐language‐based recommendations are proposed to increase the engagement with the system. Hence, potential improvements of up to the 57.7% for ride comfort evaluation parameters, as well as up to the 47.1% in greenhouse‐gasses emissions are expected to be reached.

Driving style (DS) classification and identification plays an increasingly important role in the development of advanced driver assistance systems and automated vehicles. Both the enhancement of driving safety and the improvement of fuel efficiency are essential goals of current research in driving style characterization. However, the comfort perspective has still hardly been investigated, despite its importance for the future of driving automation. This paper proposes a driving style classification method, focused on global comfort of the driver and the passengers, but which can also be integrated into the above safety-efficiency viewpoint. Although human comfort in vehicles is affected by different factors, the amplitude and frequency of accelerations are recognized as key signals for assessing driving comfort. The proposed DS classification approach is based on a hybrid machine learning method that combines an unsupervised clustering method with a data-driven extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. Hierarchical clustering is used to explore the relevance of the acceleration components in relation to ride comfort, while a single layer ELM topology is implemented to model the DS classifier. The method has been evaluated using experimental data obtained with an instrumented car equipped with in-vehicle sensors and measurement units. The obtained clustering results are consistent with comfort standard indicators, while the data-driven algorithm provides encouraging results: more than 95 % classification rate using unseen data.

Pollution that originates from automobiles is a concern in the current world, not only because of global warming, but also due to the harmful effects on people’s health and lives. Despite regulations on exhaust gas emissions being applied, minimizing unsuitable driving habits that cause elevated fuel consumption and emissions would achieve further reductions. For that reason, this work proposes a self-organized map (SOM)-based intelligent system in order to provide drivers with eco-driving-intended driving style (DS) recommendations. The development of the DS advisor uses driving data from the Uyanik instrumented car. The system classifies drivers regarding the underlying causes of non-optimal DSs from the eco-driving viewpoint. When compared with other solutions, the main advantage of this approach is the personalization of the recommendations that are provided to motorists, comprising the handling of the pedals and the gearbox, with potential improvements in both fuel consumption and emissions ranging from the 9.5% to the 31.5%, or even higher for drivers that are strongly engaged with the system. It was successfully implemented using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device of the Xilinx ZynQ programmable system-on-a-chip (PSoC) family. This SOM-based system allows for real-time implementation, state-of-the-art timing performances, and low power consumption, which are suitable for developing advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs).