Minimizing Motion Sickness In Autonomous Vehicles; A Hybrid Approach

For a century motion sickness has existed to trouble the common passenger of land vehicles with varying symptoms such as; fatigue, eyestrain, sweating, nausea, dizziness, drowsiness, headaches, vertigo and vomiting. This will be an ongoing dilemma for the future passengers of fully autonomous land vehicles which might affect the commercial uptake of this technology. Non-driving passenger activities such as watching a movie, or even rotating their seats to converse to one another would lead to greater levels of motion sickness in passengers than ever before, as the three main receptors of our balance (vision, vestibular and proprioceptors) will get triggered unevenly leading to a dis-co-ordination with our central nervous system. However, with emerging technologies and state of the art controllers; automated driving can be made seamless by perfecting maneuvers known to cause motion sickness (cornering maneuver). Key lies in reducing the impacts of lateral acceleration and roll on passengers by limiting those forces generated by the vehicle in the first place, specifically while cornering. The present study investigates different control strategies with various controllers such as; (1) The traditional Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers, (2) Fuzzy Logic controllers (FLC) and (3) the use of Model Predictive Controller (MPC) to mitigate motion sickness of passengers by maximizing handling comfort and minimizing motion sickness and postural instability. The study draws an ideal path using a 3-pt NURBS curve over a reference track, that is designed considering various components of motion sickness (motion sickness thresholds). The effects on motion sickness reduction, using various control strategies with the mentioned controllers are then studied by numerically comparing results in terms of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the frequency spectrum of steering angles, Motion sickness Dosage Value (MSDV) of the vehicle's lateral acceleration and Motion Sickness Incidence (MSI) of the head tilt angles of the passengers during the cornering maneuver. Consequently, the findings are used to propose potential guidelines for design of new infrastructure which are specifically built for an autonomous transportation future.