Novel Motion Sickness Minimization Control via Fuzzy-PID Controller for Autonomous Vehicle

In terms of vehicle dynamics, motion sickness (MS) occurs because of the large lateral acceleration produced by inappropriate wheel turning. In terms of passenger behavior, subjects experience MS because they normally tilt their heads towards the direction of lateral acceleration. Relating these viewpoints, the increment of MS originates from the large lateral acceleration produced by the inappropriate wheel’s turn, which then causes greater head movement with respect to the lateral acceleration direction. Therefore, this study proposes the utilization of fuzzy-proportional integral derivative (PID) controller for an MS minimization control structure, where the interaction of the lateral acceleration and head tilt concept is adopted to diminish the lateral acceleration. Here, the head movement is used as the controlled variable to compute the corrective wheel angle. The estimation of the head movement is carried out by an estimation model developed by the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) method. An experiment involving a driving simulator was conducted, to verify the proposed control system’s performance in regard to the autonomous vehicle’s passengers. The results show that the averages of motion sickness incidence (MSI) index can be lowered by 3.95% for single lap and 11.49% for ten laps.