Driver Independent Road Curve Characterisation

A method to determine the statistical distribution of curvature of road curves is presented. The curvature is the inverse of the radius at any point. From road construction requirements it is reasonable to model the curvature of a road curve with a trapezoid. The algorithm presented detects curves from measurements and fits a trapezoid to each curve. The residual between the fitted trapezoid and the measured curvature can be seen as the driver influence. The method is verified against proving ground measurements and applied to a series of measurements in Brazil with different drivers on the same road. The distributions of the curvature for the different drivers are presented and the variance of the residuals in the curves is used to compare the effects of the different driving styles.