COVER STORY
Ansible Motion’s latest solution, the Delta S3 simulator
F
or automotive manufacturers, the benefi ts of simulation over real-world testing are multi-faceted, believes Ian
Haigh, solutions manager at Ansible Motion. “OEMs are under growing pressure to develop their increasingly complex vehicles more quickly, at higher quality and at lower costs using cutting-edge technology, all while remaining environmentally sustainable. This is what our products enable customers to do; meet changing demands from a rapidly evolving industry,” explains Haigh. The products Haigh refers to are
the British fi rm’s Driver-in-the-Loop (DIL) simulators, notably its fl agship range, the Delta series. And one of their biggest selling points, according to Haigh, is the freedom they off er engineers in terms of creativity. “When DIL simulation is included in advance of physical prototype construction, or in parallel with it, engineers can evaluate new concepts at the earliest stages with low risk. This gives them considerably more freedom to consider novel solutions that would perhaps be deemed too costly or time-consuming to pursue in the real world,” he says. “As has been proven many times, some of the most original and revolutionary advancements in automotive technology were born
FROM ROAD TO RACETRACK
Ansible Motion’s simulators are suitable for simulating any type of ground vehicle – including passenger cars, high-performance race cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles and more. “A Formula 1 car is, of course, a completely different beast from, say, a heavy goods vehicle (HGV),” Haigh notes. “But from our view, as a DIL simulator provider, there are actually more similarities than differences. Ultimately, different vehicle types are defi ned by their physics models – which for us is a replaceable software element. Then, of course, there is the cabin environment, which is an easily swappable simulator component. Beyond that, we are simply dealing with the human sensory elements – which are highly tuneable and reconfi gurable.”
Haigh points out that the company has many OEM and
research-oriented customers that assign their simulator usage to wildly different vehicle developments within the same day: “A morning simulator session might be dedicated
to connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) work, and then the afternoon session might be assigned to setting up a high- performance rally car to tackle Pikes Peak.”
from giving engineers the freedom to push boundaries and ‘be engineers.’ DIL simulation, by its very nature, encourages technical exploration and concept evaluation. This is because vehicle and environment changes occur with keystrokes instead of physical changes and because the virtual world is a risk-free space where edge cases (and beyond) can be safely explored.”
WORLD IN MOTION Ansible Motion has put a great deal of eff ort into developing products that deliver the abovementioned freedom in the most accurate, intuitive and results-driven way for their users. The latest iteration – the Delta Stratiform 3 (S3) – uses the company’s proprietary ‘six degrees of freedom’ motion platform, which it describes as feature-rich and highly scalable for diff erent applications. On this, Haigh comments: “The platform produces high accelerations, high velocities, large displacements with high bandwidth, plus precise, low- latency dynamics for convincing reproduction of even the most subtle vehicle attributes. Many key driving manoeuvres can be conducted 1:1 with the real world, for unmatched realism.” Haigh proudly adds that, “For automotive development, there
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