Simulation of natural environment impacts on intelligent vehicle based on a virtual reality platform

Studies show that variable or adverse Natural Environment (NE) could increase the probability of traffic accidents. However, NE impacts were largely ignored in current researches of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)/Automated Highway System (AHS). To fill this research gap, in this paper, based on the NE conceptual model for intelligent vehicle and Virtual Reality (VR), a new method is presented to analyze and simulate the NE effects on intelligent vehicle to help designing more appropriate intelligent vehicle controllers. It is realized on the Intelligent Vehicles Virtual Reality (IVVR) platform in which several experiments with proposed simulation architecture are carried out to analyze the NE impacts through not only curves or data but also comprehensible simulation results presented visually in a 3-D virtual world.