Reducing Motion Sickness by Manipulating an Autonomous Vehicle's Accelerations

Without intervention the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles could be compromised by an increased incidence of motion sickness compared to conventional cars. To investigate whether passengers’ motion sickness can be reduced by manipulating an autonomous vehicle's accelerations on a fixed route without altering the travel time, a human-out-of-the-loop experiment was performed in the SIMONA Research Simulator at Delft University of Technology. The experiment consisted of two different driving conditions, in which an identical 22-km road including 52 curves was travelled in 30 minutes. Condition 1 comprised larger longitudinal, but smaller lateral, acceleration values compared to Condition 2. Experimental results suggested that Condition 1 resulted in more severe motion sickness than Condition 2, with fitted learning curves providing final MIsery SCale scores of 1.19 vs. 0.80. A similar relative difference between the two conditions had been predicted by the 6-DOF Subjective Vertical Conflict model. Hence, this model has the potential to, once further developed, support the design of autonomous vehicles by reducing the need to perform costly, time-consuming experiments.