The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has released a report on the first instrumented-vehicle study undertaken with the primary purpose of collecting large-scale, naturalistic driving data. According to the report, drivers were given no special instructions, no experimenter was present, and the data collection instrumentation was unobtrusive. In addition, 78 of 100 vehicles were privately owned. The report suggest that the database contains many extreme cases of driving behavior and performance, including severe drowsiness, impairment, judgment error, risk taking, willingness to engage in secondary tasks, aggressive driving, and traffic violations. The report’s data set includes approximately 2,000,000 vehicle miles, almost 43,000 hours of data, 241 primary and secondary drivers, 12 to 13 months of data collection for each vehicle, and data from a highly capable instrumentation system including 5 channels of video and many vehicle state and kinematic sensors.
This Summary Last Modified On: 4/22/2011