CSIR-CRRI’s Indigenous Car Driving Simulator for Comprehensive Driver Testing to enhance Road Safety
CSIR-Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) India’s premier national laboratory, a constituent of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) continues to break fresh ground in increasing road safety in India by aiming to minimise road fatalities through research. A customised Indigenous Car Driving Simulator has been designed and developed by CSIR-CRRI, New Delhi in collaboration with sister laboratories namely, CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation (CSIR-CSIO), Chandigarh and CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratories (CSIR-NAL), Bengaluru along with Industrial partner FAROS Simulation Systems Pvt Ltd. The developed simulator is set to prove a catalyst for road safety in India for screening unsafe or risk-taking drivers for further modulation through purposive and valid training.
The developed simulator is unique in nature. In general, simulators evaluate a driver’s skill related reactions only, but the developed simulator tests the driver’s psychomotor skills including reaction time, speed and distance judgement, tolerance capacity for driving stress, fatigue etc.
Further, the developed software incorporates typical Indian road surface conditions (like potholes etc), Indian vehicles, Indian driving behaviour such as wrong side driving, varying traffic density, sudden appearance of an intrusion of for example a stray animal, a pedestrian, a bicycle on to the driver’s path and varying or adverse weather conditions.
The simulator also has an instructor station from where the instructor can control the simulator while testing and training the driver by introducing various sudden situations such as roadside hazards and much more.
The software of simulator has been designed in such a way that it can be used to measure driving skills and behavioural traits of drivers of other categories of vehicles with some hardware changes along with the parameters like acceleration, deceleration characteristics, RPM.
For providing a realistic feel of driving, full actual, Car with three projector panels, which display the road conditions with background, covering 135 degrees of vision, much more like a car’s windscreen have been incorporated in the simulator. The vehicle has all the usual fixtures like accelerator, brake pedal and clutch as well as gear shift, rear-view, side view mirrors and other display like a regular car.
The evaluation of driver by simulator is presented in the form of “Driver Report” which records all the events of driving such as number of conflicts, number of times, speed limits breached, number of times brake pedal pressed, slow, over or under-revving of engine and much more. Also, different driver testing tracks have been designed and developed and built in the simulator, which will be finally helpful for testing in the applicants for learner driver and also issuing driving licence by transport departments. The simulator can be used for evaluating driving skills and issuing driving licence by transport departments.
This will to a large extent modernise the license issuing process of transport departments which will result in a more precise evaluation of a driver’s skills minimising oversights in the process.
{Feature has been uploaded by CSIR (Unit for Science Dissemination), Ministry of Science & Technology, New Delhi}.
