Motion Planning of Self-driving Vehicles for Motion Sickness Minimisation

Self-driving vehicles are expected to push towards the evolution of mobility environment in the near future. However, motion sickness has been proven to be one of the main limitations to the successful introduction of fully automated vehicles. Recently, research into motion sickness on autonomous vehicles has just started to get attention. In particular, recent researches have focused on providing solutions to mitigate motion sickness with ideas from the field of human factors and ergonomics, interior design and automotive engineering. However, limited or no representative work has been done in motion planning in terms of motion sickness minimisation. In this respect,this paper presents the application of motion planning in order to minimize motion sickness in self-driving vehicles. By formulating an optimal control problem, the optimum velocity profile is sought for a predefined road path from a specific starting point to a final one. Specific and given boundaries and constrains are applied in order to minimize the motion sickness without compromising the journey time. F or the representation of the motion sickness as a cost function to our optimal control problem, the illness rating is used. Different case studies are investigated by changing the cost functions of our problem as well as varying the lateral manoeuvrability of the vehicle. According to the results, the road with flexible lateral manoeuvrability is found to provide lower sickness as well as shorter journey time when both motion sickness and journey time are consider in the cost function.