FEATURE MOTION CONTROL AUTOMOTIVE
SIMULATION: the journey so far
Driver-in-the-Loop (DIL) simulation sounds cutting-edge but, for over half a century now, it has been an increasingly essential tool for vehicle
engineers – from those early days affixing cars onto clunky Stewart motion platforms, through to today’s low latency and immersive simulators. Yet the last ten years has seen
the biggest shift, thanks to more developments in use case and technology than the previous decade. Ansible Motion looks at the trends influencing this technology
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uccessful DIL simulation requires the human participant to be ‘tricked’ into behaving as
they would in a real vehicle based on simulated sensory information. In a driving simulator, the human senses responsible for optical (vision), haptic (touch), audio (sound), olfactory (smell) and vestibular (movement) reckoning are deceived to make a driver believe he or she is in an actual car on an actual road and it’s this physiological interplay that has fuelled simulator demand and development. More and more, automotive engineers have
come to realise that legacy Stewart motion platforms (‘hexapods’), the universal motion machinery technologies lifted directly from aviation applications, are not ideally suited to recreate the highly-responsive, dynamic environments required for automobiles. That’s because the dynamics of ground vehicles are typically characterised by short, sharp movements, not the comparatively sluggish motions of aircraft. As it turns out, the physics of trajectory control via pneumatic tyres is quite different from that of aerofoils. To address this problem, Ansible Motion
invented – and has been refining for the last decade – a ‘stratiform’ motion system, a layered machine topology with each stratum cleverly serving as independently controlled axes directly associated with real vehicle motion directions. The result has been to achieve maximum acceleration in all primary motion degrees of freedom without the characteristic sluggishness that befuddles legacy hexapod performance. In engineering parlance, Ansible Motion’s stratiform motion machinery and motion cueing solutions, along with its supplemental motion systems, provide low-latency dynamic performance with up to 16 motion degrees-of-freedom.
VIRTUAL POSSIBILITIES Together with the mechanical enhancements, developments in computer processing power and visualisation technologies have been major elements in the improvements giving rise to overall human immersivity in the past decade. When you factor in an array of 4k projectors broadcasting high resolution content (5x better than your local cinema) seamlessly across someone’s entire field of view, visual immersion in a virtual world becomes possible. It even goes beyond what is pleasing to the
human eye. This is real-time world-space content for dynamic scenarios, such that driving simulators are now being trusted as tools to validate specific automotive technologies driven by sensor fusion and control logic, including active safety systems such as Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems, and even entirely new vehicle concepts including Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs).
A SOUND SOLUTION Ansible Motion’s innovative approach to ground vehicle simulation is, in some respects, centred
24 MAY 2020 | DESIGN SOLUTIONS
on harnessing the capabilities of the human vestibulum by mapping it and making it a part of the motion cueing control strategies. When correctly executed, in a building block sense, with Ansible Motion’s other sensory stimulation mapping (visuals, in particular), a driver can be convinced that they are driving a real vehicle, at speed, over hills and highways, whilst sitting in a representative cabin inside a relatively small laboratory room. According to some industry specialists, the
proliferation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is now fuelling driving simulator developments. Megatrends such as autonomy, connectivity and electrification have made cars more complex, yet development times are no shorter and a duty of care means OEMs have many more possibilities to test than ever before. Testing in a driving simulator, in a true laboratory environment, means that human participants can be measured alongside everything else in the experiments. Physiological measures (such as eye tracking, pulse rate, galvanic skin response, etc.), gathered simultaneously alongside traditional vehicle analytics, can contribute to vehicle manufacturers’ and engineers’ deeper understanding of human-vehicle interactions.
WHAT NEXT? With such advances in the last ten years, what does the next decade have in store? An overriding theme is the rise of autonomy and the capability to validate AI and machine learning. As such, DIL simulators are charged with being capable of testing such scenarios efficiently, repeatably and, most importantly, safely. With more automotive engineering departments relying on simulation, this technology will undoubtedly expand to enable even more people to access them. No longer are they the preserve of vehicle
dynamics, motorsports or HMI engineers, but User Experience, Driver Assistance, Comfort, Legal departments and more are trusting results gleaned from the virtual world. Having achieved the core fidelity needed to provide valid data, driving simulators may have already come of age, but they also have a longlife expectancy.
Ansible Motion
www.ansiblemotion.com
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