Review of Motion Sickness-associated Comfort Studies for Occupants in Autonomous Vehicles

The development and popularization of self-driving vehicles have largely improved the traffic safety and efficiency. However, as most of the current decision planning algorithms and control strategies for self-driving vehicles focus on considering the safety criterion while neglecting the differences in driving habits and human-machine coordination criterion of the drivers and passengers, the self-driving process may cause discomfort to the occupants. Therefore, the optimization of comfort while ensuring the safety of self-driving vehicles, particularly the solution of occupant motion sickness-related comfort problems, is an important problem to be solved in the comfort improvement of self-driving vehicles. In this regard, for the prevention and control of occupant motion sickness-associated comfort of automatic-driving vehicles, in this study, the causes of motion sickness were analyzed from the aspects of the intrinsic mechanism of occupant motion sickness and external motion parameters of the automatic-driving vehicles. The commonly used subjective and objective assessment methods in the research of the current motion sickness-associated comfort and prediction methods of motion sickness comfort were then analyzed. Combined with the results of the analysis of the causes of motion sickness, optimization of the planning and control algorithms and optimization of the human-motion-control algorithms were carried out according to results of automatic driving. The control strategies for mitigation of motion sickness are summarized in terms of optimization of planning and control algorithms and improvement in human-computer interaction. In view of the limitations of the existing research, future prospects are proposed in terms of the completeness of the motion sickness causation model, physiological signal acquisition method and its validity, quantification of the motion sickness comfort evaluation standard and establishment of a database, further optimization of the control strategy for mitigation of the motion sickness of the occupants, etc. This can provide research references for an improvement in the theoretical system of motion sickness-related comfort in the self-driving vehicles. © 2024 Chang'an University. All rights reserved.