Road Safety and Driving Simulation Laboratory

Active since 2015, the Road Safety and Driving Simulation Laboratory (RSDS), supports the activities of the ICAR-04 (Roads, Railways, Airports) scientific sector regarding the geometric design of road, with specific emphasis to road safety issues associated to any user (i.e., drivers and passengers, cyclists and pedestrians). 

The research topics concern:

 - vehicle, driver, infrastructure, and environment interaction;

- the operational effects of road geometrics;

- the sight analysis;

- the safety analysis through the use of predicting methods;

- operational speed measurements and modelling (for speed limit definition, evaluation of the effectiveness of traffic moderation systems, speed-mitigation systems monitoring, speed management)

EQUIPMENT FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH

Carbon-fiber pole for field video acquisition Action Cam HD 1080p Wi-Fi and GPS Inertial-GPS positioning unit for naturalistic survey on instrumented vehicles Retroreflectometer for horizontal marking Eye-tracking system for naturalistic driving tests Driving simulator SCANeR™ Studio - software Instrument that allows eye tracking for laboratory tests

• OBSERVATIONAL METHODS:
  • Carbon-fiber pole for field video acquisition
  • N.2 Action-cam 

• NATURALISTIC METHODS:
  • Inertial-GPS positioning unit (Xsens)
  • Retroreflectometer for horizontal marking
  • Eye-tracking system for naturalistic driving tests 

• EXPERIMENTAL METHODS:
  • Driving Simulator (AV Simulation - CDS 650)
  • Virtual Reality Headset 
  • Eye-tracking system for laboratory tests 

• OTHER INSTRUMENTS:
  • breathalyser
  • Anti-distraction devices
  • Biometric sensors 

• SOFTWARE (used):
  • SCANeR Studio 1.9 (stand-alone, workstation and student pack)
  • Kinovea (image analysis)
  • MATLab - Simulink
  • Jamovi (Statistical package)
  • R (Statistical package)