Challenges and potentials of the self-propelled, highly immersive driving simulator

Authors

M. Ottensmeier, Institut für Automobiltechnik Dresden, TU Dresden

Summary

The increasing automation of vehicle guidance requires special investigations, especially regarding the development, verification, and homologation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and automated driving functions with handover requests. An essential tool is a driving simulator, which allows reproducible and safe investigations of the human-machine interaction, especially for critical scenarios. High-level simulators provide high fidelity and reliability for the simulation and, therefore, the highest level of immersion. State-of-the-art high-level simulators always have an environmental coupling, limiting their motion range. TU Dresden and AMST-Systemtechnik GmbH developed a new 'highly immersive' driving simulator, which is self-propelled and there-fore has a theoretically unlimited range of motion, offering great potential for individual investigations. The wheel-based motion platform can represent all drive maneuvers, generated by a regular road user, in the plane by translational motion, even long-lasting accelerations. The primary translational motion minimizes the use of Tilt Coordination and, therefore, avoids the driver's perception of the unexpected and false tilt motion. In addition, the motion platform allows an individual application of the driving simulator at any suitable location and uncomplicated relocation by remote control.

In contrast, the tire-based force transmission poses enormous challenges for the control system, as especially the transient tire characteristics lead to latency in acceleration. Compensating for these latencies and guarantee presentable target accelerations for the motion platform, the control system includes a particular motion concept, a pre-filter, and special single wheel control. The motion concept ensures a minimum wheel velocity to decrease the latency due to relaxation behavior, and the pre-filter considers possible saturation of the steering engine. The single wheel control's basis is an ex-tended HSRI (Highway Safety Research Institute) tire model, providing real-time capability, numerical stability, and high performance and accuracy for the control system. This control additionally requires a state estimator for each wheel. The potentials and challenges presented in this paper result only from theoretical considerations.