The impact of sleepiness on lane positioning in truck driving

Book chapter, 2011

This chapter concerns the detection of sleepiness in truck drivers. Data obtained from a driver sleepiness study involving real-world driving are used in order to analyse the performance of several sleepiness indicators based on driving behavior; such as, for example, variability in lateral position and heading angle. Contrary to the results obtained for passenger cars, for heavy trucks it is found that indicators based on variability provide little or no information; their performance does not rise significantly above chance levels. However, the data indicate that there is a significant difference in the average lane position for sleepy and alert drivers, respectively, such that a sleepy driver generally places the vehicle closer (by about 0.2 m) to the centre of the road than an alert driver. The analysis also shows a significant, monotonous, increase in average lateral position (measured from the right, outer, lane boundary towards the lane centre) between the four cases of (i) daytime alert driving, (ii) daytime sleepy driving, (iii) night-time alert driving and (iv) nighttime sleepy driving.