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Driving skills and driving experience develop differently between a civilian and a military service member. Since 2000, the Department of Defense reports that two-thirds of non-related to war fatalities among active duty service members were due to transportation-related incidents. In addition, vehicle crashes are the leading non-related to war cause of both fatalities and serious injuries among active duty Marines. A pilot safe driving program for Marines was jointly developed by the Richard Petty Driving Experience and Clemson University Automotive Safety Research Institute. The pilot program includes four modules based on leading causes of vehicle crashes, and uses classroom and behind the wheel components to improve and reinforce safe driving skills and knowledge. The assessment results of this pilot program conducted with 192 Marines in September 2011 at Camp LeJeune, NC are presented and discussed.

Barriers are commonly used on roadways to separate and to protect against vehicles traveling in opposing directions from possible head-on collisions. However, these barriers may interfere with wildlife passage such that animals become trapped on the road. Typically, small animals cannot find safe passage across all traffic lanes due to the presence of solid barriers and eventually die after being hit by a vehicle. The occurrence of animal-to-vehicle collisions also presents a dangerous scenario for motorists as a driver may intuitively swerve to avoid hitting the animal. In this paper, a redesigned Jersey style barrier, named the Clemson smart portal, will be presented and discussed. This roadway barrier features a portal for small animal travel, along with a mechatronic-based warning system to notify drivers of animal passage.

A safe driver program has been established through a public-private partnership. This program targets novice drivers and uses a combination of classroom and in-vehicle training exercises to address critical driver errors known to lead to crashes. Students participate in four modules: braking to learn proper stopping technique, obstacle avoidance / reaction time to facilitate proper lane selection and collision avoidance, tailgating to learn about following distances, and loss of control to react appropriately when a vehicle is about to become laterally unstable. Knowledge pre and posttests are also administered at the start and end of the program. Students' in-vehicle driving performance are evaluated by instructors as well as recorded by onboard data acquisition units. The data has been evaluated with objective and subjective grading rubrics. The 70 participants in three classes used as a case study achieved an average skill score of 83.93/100.

Motor vehicle crashes involving novice drivers are significantly higher than matured driver incidents as reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality Analysis Reporting System (NHTSA-FARS). Researchers around the world and the United States are focused on how to decrease crashes for this driver demographic. Novice drivers usually complete driver education classes as a pre-requisite for full licensure to improve overall knowledge and safety. However, compiled statistics still indicate a need for more in-depth training after full licensure. An opportunity exists to supplement in-vehicle driving with focused learning modules using automotive simulators. In this paper, a training program for “Following Etiquette” and “Situational Awareness” was developed to introduce these key driving techniques and to complete a feasibility study using a driving simulator as the training tool.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), motor collisions account for nearly 2.4 million injuries and 37 thousand fatalities each year in the United States. A great deal of research has been done in the area of vehicular safety, but very little has been completed to ensure licensed drivers are properly trained. Given the inherent risks in driving itself, the test for licensure should be uniform and consistent. To address this issue, an inexpensive, portable data acquisition and analysis system has been developed for the evaluation of driver performance. A study was performed to evaluate the system, and each participant was given a normalized driver rating. The average driver rating was μ=55.6, with a standard deviation of σ=12.3. All but 3 drivers fell into the so-called “Target Zone”, defined by a Driver Rating of μ± 1σ.

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) may encounter difficulties accommodating environmental uncertainties and system degradations during harsh conditions. However, human experience and onboard intelligence can may help mitigate such cases. Unfortunately, human operators have cognition limits when directly supervising multiple UGVs. Ideally, an automated decision aid can be designed that empowers the human operator to supervise the UGVs. In this paper, we consider a connected UGV platoon under cyber attacks that may disrupt safety and degrade performance. An observer-based resilient control strategy is designed to mitigate the effects of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) cyber attacks. In addition, each UGV generates both internal and external evaluations based on the platoons performance metrics. A cloud-based trust-based information management system collects these evaluations to detect abnormal UGV platoon behaviors.

Vehicle safety remains a significant concern for consumers, government agencies, and automotive manufacturers. One critical type of vehicle accident results from the right or left side tires leaving the road surface and then returning abruptly due to large steering wheel inputs (road runoff and return). A subset of runoff road crashes that involve a steep hard shoulder has been labeled shoulder induced accidents. In this paper, a limited authority real time steering controller has been developed to mitigate shoulder induced accidents. A Kalman Filter based tire cornering stiffness estimation technique has been coupled with a feedback controller and driver intention module to create a safer driving solution without excessive intervention. In numerical studies, lateral vehicle motion improvements of 30% were realized for steering intervention. Specifically, the vehicle crossed the centerline after 1.0 second in the baseline case versus 1.3 seconds with steering assistance at 60 kph.