Cross-Platform Validation of Pedestrian Simulators

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Klaus Bengler
• Subject Area: Human Factors, Ergonomics, Human-Machine Systems ; Traffic and Transport Systems, Intelligent and Automated Traffic
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317326196

Globally the number of road users is still consequently rising. While safety measures in cars are being developed to reduce the accidents rate overall, the fatality of pedestrians is still considerably high, especially in urban environments. In 2013 22% of all killed persons in traffic accidents in Europe were pedestrians. Furthermore the fatality rate of pedestrians has decreased by only 11% since 2010 compared to the 17.5% decline of all traffic participants. The majority of these deaths occur in locations with higher population density: 69% of all pedestrian fatalities in the EU arise in urban areas. (European Commission, 2015) While driving simulators have been already a valuable tool for investigations of human behavior and validation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) (concerning the driver its site) for decades, the development of pedestrian simulators is still in the fledgling stages. These kind of pedestrian simulators shall serve to investigate human behavior in urban traffic scenarios in a reproducible, safe and cost efficient way, enabling subject studies from the point of view of a pedestrian in hazardous traffic situations, such as urban crossing scenarios. The French research institute IFSTTAR and the German university TU München have been in this field on the cutting edge from the very beginning. Independently, they developed two different types of pedestrian simulators using different technological approaches. After having already run some experiments on each side using this new technology, the desire grew to compare the two simulators. By running the same experiments on both simulators the technological impact on the studies could be investigated and a cross-platform validation performed, confirming the validity of the used simulators and allowing to transfer the results of future empirical studies on the reality. To perfect the validity, both simulators shall be compared to experiments in real life under similar conditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partner: Viola Cavallo, Ph.D.