Analysis and Identification of a Vehicle Occupant's Head Position Dynamic Response to Longitudinal Acceleration

Vehicle occupants head movements respond to the vehicle motion and have a significant impact on comfort. An accurate knowledge of these dynamics is thus important for planning the motion of autonomous vehicles. This paper focuses on the analysis and modeling of the head tilting movement caused by braking and acceleration. After discussing the differences between the driver and passenger's head movements, we propose two dynamic models that captures these dynamics: a Wiener model and a Neural Network one. We identify and validate these models on data collected on an instrumented car showing that both can capture the movements caused by the longitudinal acceleration.