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In addition to the analysis of human driving behavior or the development of new advanced driver assistance systems, the high simulation quality of today’s driving simulators enables investigations of selected topics pertaining to driving dynamics. With high reproducibility and fast generation of vehicle variants the subjective evaluation process leads to a better system understanding in the early development stages. The transfer of the original on-road test run to the virtual reality of the driving simulator includes the full flexibility of the vehicle model, the maneuver and the test track, which allows new possibilities of investigation. With the opportunity of a realistic whole-vehicle simulation provided by the Stuttgart Driving Simulator new analysis of the human’s thresholds of perception are carried out.

This paper proposes a framework for semi-autonomous longitudinal guidance for electric vehicles. To lower the risk for pedestrian collisions in urban areas, a velocity trajectory which is given by the driver is optimized with respect to safety aspects with the help of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). Safety aspects, such as speed limits and pedestrians on the roadway, are considered as velocity and spatial constraints within prediction horizon in NMPC formulation. A slack variable is introduced to enable overshooting of velocity constraints in situations with low risk potential to rise driver acceptance. By changing the weight of slack variable, the control authority can be shifted continuously from driver to automation. Within this work, a prototypical real-time implementation of the longitudinal guidance system is presented and the potential of the approach is demonstrated in human-in-the-loop test drives in the Stuttgart Driving Simulator.