TRAVERSE: Traffic-Responsive Autonomous Vehicle Experience & Rare-Event Simulation for Enhanced Safety

Data for training learning-enabled self-driving cars in the physical world are typically collected in a safe, normal environment. Such data distribution often engenders a strong bias towards safe driving, making self-driving cars unprepared when encountering adversarial scenarios like un- expected accidents. Due to a dearth of such adverse data that is unrealistic for drivers to collect, autonomous vehicles can perform poorly when experiencing such rare events. This work addresses much-needed research by having participants drive a VR vehicle simulator going through simulated traffic with various types of accidental scenarios. It aims to understand human responses and behaviors in simulated accidents, con- tributing to our understanding of driving dynamics and safety. The simulation framework adopts a robust traffic simulation and is rendered using the Unity Game Engine. Furthermore, the simulation framework is built with portable, light-weight immersive driving simulator hardware, lowering the resource barrier for studies in autonomous driving research.