Modeling Driving Behavior at Roundabouts: Impact of Roundabout Layout and Surrounding Traffic on Driving Behavior

Driving behavior prediction at roundabouts is an important challenge to improve driving safety by supporting drivers with intelligent assistance systems. To predict the driving behavior effciently steering wheel status was proven to have robust predictability based on a Support Vector Machine algorithm. Previous research has not considered potential effects of roundabout layout and surrounding traffic on driving behavior, but that consideration can certainly improve the prediction results. Therefore, this study investigated how roundabout layout and surrounding traffic impact driving behavior of an ego car. A simulator study was conducted to collect driving behavior data with different roundabout layout settings and different surrounding cyclist position settings. The local minima/maxima of the steering angle was found to have a logarithmic relationship with the roundabout geometric feature. The impact of the surrounding traffic on the ego driver behavior was also found: When there were surrounding cyclists, the recognition rate of ego driver behavior patterns reached 100% later than when there was no surrounding traffic. In conclusion, driving behavior at roundabouts is effected by both roundabout layout and surrounding traffic, and the relationship can be expressed in a quantitative way