Abstract—Personal Mobility Vehicles (PMVs) have been recently attracted considerable interest as next-generation vehicles for individual use. However, when a PMV is allowed to be used in pedestrian areas, it should be friendly to its driver and surrounding pedestrians. In this paper, we proposed a semi-active driving assistance system for a four-wheeled PMV that detects the personal space of nearby pedestrians, informs the driver about the vehicle’s invasion of pedestrian’s personal space, and cooperates with the driver in avoiding pedestrians. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed assistance system, an experiment was conducted under the condition that the PMV encountered pedestrians and steering angle gain changed, and questionnaires of drivers’ feeling were used as an evaluation index. The experimental results showed that the effectiveness of the proposed system has been confirmed, the drivers felt more comfortable when driving PMV with the assistance system. 
 

Index Terms—assistance system, four-wheeled vehicle, pedestrian, personal space, steering gain

Cite: Thai Quoc Pham, Chihiro Nakagawa, Atsuhiko Shintani, and Tomohiro Ito, "The Effect of a Semi-Active Driving Assistance System on the Driver of a Four-Wheeled Personal Mobility Vehicle," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 322-326, July 2017. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.6.4.322-326