Use of Naturalistic Driving Studies for Identification of Vehicle Dynamics

This paper discusses the feasibility of data captured in a long-term Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) for identification of vehicle dynamics. Driving data were captured for over a year. In this data capture, there was minimal effort to define or control everyday driving practices. While the use of real-world data for model parameter identification is a well-known method, NDS are commonly used to explore the behavior of drivers or to analyze real-world traffic situations. Data from NDS have not yet been used for the purpose of parameterizing vehicle dynamics models since everyday drives commonly do not reflect the full range of vehicle dynamics. This leads to the question if the data from an NDS contains the needed information to describe vehicle dynamics accurately. This paper shows that data captured from long-term everyday vehicle usage is sufficient to characterize vehicle dynamics models. It uses lateral vehicle dynamics as an example to show how the data quantity changes the model accuracy and robustness. There is a point where any further data capture produces redundancy and does not add to the overall information. The well-known single-track model serves as the modeling example which offers options to simply compare the derived model behavior with a reference.