Investigating Initial Driver Intention on Overtaking on Rural Roads

Driver intention recognition is essential to the development of advanced driver assistance systems providing real-time support. Current approaches for the recognition of overtaking intentions focus on drivers’ observable behaviors, neglecting the fact that the intention to overtake a slower lead car emerges earlier than the resulting behavior. This paper aims to distinguish the "intention emerging process", when drivers form the initial intention to overtake, from the "action executing process", when drivers execute the overtaking maneuver. A driving simulator study has been conducted to investigate the influence of the lead vehicle type and lead vehicle speed on initiating driver’ intention on overtaking on rural roads, and the effect of the complexity of the oncoming traffic on executing overtaking. The results show that the initial driver intention to overtake appears much earlier than the execution of the overtaking maneuver. The lead vehicle speed has a significant influence on initial driver intention in the "intention emerging process", while time to overtake increases with the number of the oncoming vehicles in the "action execution process". These results can contribute to the development of models for driver intention recognition by extending the prediction horizon from the recognition to a prediction of driving maneuvers.