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This paper considers ground vehicle lateral/directional stability which is of primary concern in traffic safety. Lateral/directional dynamics involve yawing, rolling and lateral acceleration motions, and stability concerns include spinout and rollover. Lateral/directional dynamics are dominated by tire force response which depends on horizontal slip, camber angle and normal load. Vehicle limit maneuvering conditions can lead to tire force responses that result in vehicle spinout and rollover. This paper describes accident analysis, vehicle testing and computer simulation analysis designed to give insight into basic vehicle design variables that contribute to stability problems. Field test procedures and results for three vehicles are described. The field test results are used to validate a simulation model which is then analyzed under severe maneuvering conditions to shed light on dynamic stability issues.

Performance testing provides an important complement to urine testing as a determinant of fitness for duty. Performance testing can be conducted immediately to screen out impaired workers before they undertake safety related job functions. Urine testing involves the expense and delay of laboratory testing, and results relate more to life style than current on-the-job performance capability. This paper reviews performance based testing and discusses the development and application of two performance based screening devices. One device has the capability of rapidly screening for impaired psychomotor performance given previous baseline data. The second device provides the potential for screening psychomotor and divided attention performance without prior experience or baseline data.

This paper considers experience gained from conducting fitness-for-duty testing in the work place, and reviews results obtained with a specific psychomotor task. Performance testing can provide a means for assessing worker fitness-for-duty prior to their admittance to safety critical job functions, but the testing must be reliable and efficient. This paper will discuss the balance between efficacy and efficiency and provide example data from a test that is currently employed in the work place.

This paper presents test methods and modeling procedures for identifying the directional handling characteristics of vehicles over the full maneuvering range from straight running to limit cornering and/or braking. The test procedures are designed to validate steady-state and dynamic response performance. The model parameters are derived from simple static tests of vehicle properties and tire parameters identified from tire machine tests. Current steady-state field test procedures validate the model response under cornering only conditions. Model analysis then extrapolates vehicle response under combined cornering and braking conditions. Some discussion is devoted to potential braking in a turn transient testing for more complete model validation.

This paper describes the results of an experiment concerning driver behavior in car following tasks. The motivation for this experiment was a desire to understand typical driver car following behavior as a guide for setting the automatic control characteristics of an ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control) system. Testing was conducted under both test track and open road driving conditions. The results indicate that car following is carried out under much lower bandwidth conditions than typical steering processes. Dynamic analysis shows driver time delay in response to lead vehicle velocity change on the order of several seconds. Typical longitudinal acceleration distributions show standard deviations of less than 0.05 g (acceleration due to gravity).