PICS-L (Lab on Perceptions, Interactions, Behaviours & Simulations of road and street users) conducts pluridisciplinary research to develop knowledge and tools in order to observe, understand, improve and evaluate the mobility of individual road and street users with various levels of assistance and automation.

The lab has about forty members. It is mainly present on 2 campuses of Université Gustave Eiffel: Marne la Vallée and Versailles.

The focus of research at PICS-L is the behaviour of single users of the road and urban transport system (mainly light vehicles with advanced driving assistance or automation, cyclists and pedestrians) as they interact with other users and with the infrastructure. The lab conducts applied research in 3 cross-disciplinary fields covering different aspects of the perception-action loop at the basis of locomotion which are tackled in two dimensions: human vs. robot users, and real vs. simulated environments.

• In the field of “perception”,  we study perception systems (special vision) and the main phenomena which disrupt their operation.
• In the field of “behavior and action”, we study interactions between users and their vehicles as they interact with the infrastructure and with other users.
• In the field of “immersive simulation”, we study the fidelity of simulators and virtual reality devices implemented to study perception and behavior in safe, controled and repeatable conditions.

The lab develops and implements different scientific equipment which are both research tools and research objects: photometric and psychometric measurement systems, immersive simulators, a platform which couples a driving simulator and an automated electric vehicle, as well as various sensors for instrumenting vehicles or the road infrastructure.

PICS-L was created in 2020 by the merging of 2 laboratories of the COSYS department:

• the Laboratory on Vehicle-Infrastructure-Driver Interactions (LIVIC, created in 1999);
• The Laboratory on road Operation, Perception, Simulators and Simulations (LEPSiS, created in 2009).