Variations in driver´s mechanical admittance facing distracting tasks

Most car accidents on roads are the consequence of human mistakes. In order to improve the driving safety, current car devices should provide useful information to the driver on his/her environment and help the driver via steering wheel, dashboard signals or audio announcement when assistance is needed. An important factor which disturbs driving behavior and can lead to crash is driver distraction. It has been accurately proved that driver subjected to distracting tasks leads to a massive increase in road accident rate. The main problem lies in the lack of driving focus, which is caught by other tasks. As a result building safety car devices requires knowing the influence of distraction on driving performances and mechanical admittance. This paper aims to investigate on the correlation between the car trajectory deviation, speed bearing and mechanical arm admittance under the influence of distracting tasks. Mechanical arm admittance, to a certain extent, represents driver aim because it investigates on the relation between the perturbations, the driver reaction and the corresponding answer. Experiment results show that in 70% of investigated cases, driver distraction either decrease resistance to steering wheel perturbations or lead to poorer driving performances.