Control for motion sickness minimisation in autonomous vehicles

The question about autonomous vehicles is when rather than if. The commercial car Tesla already has an "autopilot" feature and other car manufacturer such as Ford and Volvo have promised fully autonomy within the next 5 years. Medical studies show that motion sickness (that affects almost everyone to some degree) will be more of an issue in self-driving vehicles than in conventional ones. Our research question is: can we define control strategies for autonomous driving such that passengers' motion sickness occurrences are minimised? To answer this question we require some understanding into the causes of motion sickness (still unclear), a way to quantify this physiological process, a model of this process combined with a model of the dynamics of passenger vehicles and the design of appropriate vehicle longitudinal and later control strategies. We do not exclude to augment the standard actuation system (throttle, brake and steering) with other systems such as active seats.