Foot-LITE

The Foot-LITE project aimed to deliver innovative driver/vehicle interface systems and services to encourage sustained changes to driving styles and behaviours which are safer, reduce congestion, enhance sustainability, help reduce traffic pollution emissions, and reduce other social and environmental impacts. Fundamental research was used to support the strong industry base in the project through prototype systems development and design, impact assessments and the further development of research tools and processes, including the TRG Instrumented Vehicle (IV), to deliver a credible evidence-based validation of the system through to real-world operational experiences with user feedback and evaluation.

The Foot-LITE system was seen as a tool to encourage and challenge drivers to achieve very real benefits that are already available in the current vehicle fleet but whose benefits cannot be readily maximised without an advisory interface to the driver. The ultimate choice and control still rests with the individual, which was seen to be crucial to the public and commercial acceptability of Foot-LITE. The system design options were explored with a final technical development plan agreed by the project partners, whilst the associated evaluation plan was defined. Development and evaluation followed a staged process beginning with early exploration, using a simulator, of driver distraction due to various HMI designs. These designs then progressed to the TRG IV to test the design algorithms and the refined HMI design.

A further stage then used a small number of lightly instrumented vehicles on a test track and on-road, as a final test and validation platform before moving to wider on-road trials. This final Foot-LITE system, and in particular its influence on driver behaviour, was examined using volunteer drivers over a 6 month period whilst more detailed, month-long trials with individual drivers were carried out with the earlier lightly instrumented vehicles. The latter of these trials explored the detailed emission impacts from altered driving behaviour using TRG’s Horiba OBS 2200 on-board emissions analyser.

In addition, an assessment of potential uses for the Foot-LITE system and the data it collects was also examined (e.g. insurance, road user charging, fleet management use) whilst other issues such as upscaling of trials results and general driver acceptance of the system and approach were explored.