Continuous Driver Steering Intention Prediction Considering Neuromuscular Dynamics and Driving Postures

Predicting driver steering intention enables intelligent vehicles to optimize its assistance and collaborative strategies with the human driver in advance, which contribute to an intelligent mutual-understanding system for driver-vehicle collaboration. In this study, a deep time-series learning-enabled driver steering intention prediction system is developed based on the Electromyography (EMG) signal processing. Specifically, the connection between the upper limb EMG signals from different muscles and the steering torque is established using a deep bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN). The deep time-series model is trained to predict the future steering torque with historical EMG signals, and the prediction horizon is selected as 200 ms in this study. Moreover, three different steering postures with different hand positions on the steering wheel are studied. A joint BiLSTM network with shared temporal pattern extraction layers is developed to investigate the impact of the hand positions on the steering intention prediction. It is found that based on the joint BiLSTM network, the most accurate steering intention can be achieved with both hands on 3-clock positions. The experiments are conducted on a driving simulator environment with 21 participants. The proposed system can be used for precise driver steering intention prediction system towards a better mutual-understanding module on the intelligent and automated driving vehicles.