Modelling driver steering and neuromuscular behavior

This thesis challenges the traditional view of treating steering behaviour as a tracking task, instead treating it as a reaching task. Here, reaching refers to a fundamental human behaviour with the the intriguing characteristic of having a linear relationship between maximum speed and distance, effectively making the movement time constant. Historically, by contrast, human steering behaviour has been modelled as tracking, since it was assumed that drivers follow the road by applying continuous error-minimising control. Early on, it was found that linear control could to some extent represent human steering behaviour, but with a consistent non-linear error referred to as the remnant. Using instead the framework of reaching, as in this thesis, one can better explain even the non-linear parts of steering behaviour. In the analysis of data collected within the work presented here, it was found that up to 70 % of all steering behaviour can be modelled as individual reaching movements or, in the case of driving, steering corrections. It was furthermore shown that, by allowing the superposition of two such corrections, nearly all steering behaviour can be modelled