This study aims for the new driving skill improvement support system based on driving skill evaluation. We try to define driving skill in terms of "spatial perception" and "prediction". This research can be roughly divided into two steps. The first step is to establish an objective skill evaluation model. The second step is to verify effects of the support system for driving skill improvement. In this paper, we describe that we evaluated driving skill based on parking performance, operational behavior like steering and cognitive behavior like head motion and gazing points. We conducted driving behavior measurement experiment by using a real vehicle to get operational and cognitive data during driving. In consequence, we confirmed that driving skill could be defined by spatial perception and operational behavior of drivers in approaching to an obstacle.

The accident probability of beginner drivers is significantly higher than that of experienced drivers. It can be assumed that this is due to lack of driving skills which lead to making wrong decisions according to cognition and operating in correct way. In this paper, we propose a novel assisted driving system intended to help drivers to improve their skills for the reverse parking. The system is able to assist the driver by haptic instruction on the steering wheel in order to induce the driver to make the adequate operation. For the validation, we developed a 1/10 scale car simulator as a simulation environment on which we installed the proposed assistance method and conducted reverse parking experiment by using the simulator. According to the experiment, we validated that the parking accuracy and the trajectory similarity of subjects assisted by proposed system significantly increased compare to subjects unassisted. Consequently, the proposed assisted driving system could accelerate the learning of humans' driving skills.