Driver Modeling for Detection and Assessment of Driver Distraction: Examples from the UTDrive Test Bed

Vehicle technologies have advanced significantly over the past 20 years, especially with respect to novel in-vehicle systems for route navigation, information access, infotainment, and connected vehicle advancements for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) connectivity and communications. While there is great interest in migrating to fully automated, self-driving vehicles, factors such as technology performance, cost barriers, public safety, insurance issues, legal implications, and government regulations suggest it is more likely that the first step in the progression will be multifunctional vehicles. Today, embedded controllers as well as a variety of sensors and high-performance computing in present-day cars allow for a smooth transition from complete human control toward semisupervised or assisted control, then to fully automated vehicles. Next-generation vehicles will need to be more active in assessing driver awareness, vehicle capabilities, and traffic and environmental settings, plus how these factors come together to determine a collaborative safe and effective driver-vehicle engagement for vehicle operation. This article reviews a range of issues pertaining to driver modeling for the detection and assessment of distraction. Examples from the UTDrive project are used whenever possible, along with a comparison to existing research programs. The areas addressed include 1) understanding driver behavior and distraction, 2) maneuver recognition and distraction analysis, 3) glance behavior and visual tracking, and 4) mobile platform advancements for in-vehicle data collection and human-machine interface. This article highlights challenges in achieving effective modeling, detection, and assessment of driver distraction using both UTDrive instrumented vehicle data and naturalistic driving data