Virtual prototyping has become an established design tool in complex interdisciplinary development processes. The use of functional models that enable real-time simulation as stand-ins for hardware components that are still under development has many benefits as an analysis and validation tool for developers and designers and as well as a presentation tools for communication with management and customers. Due to these benefits virtual prototyping has seen increasing acceptance in recent years, especially in the development of systems that involve complex interactions between components or require the integration of newly developed hardware. In this paper we demonstrate that the principles of virtual prototyping can also be effectively applied to the development of new user interfaces and control strategies. We describe how such an approach can be embedded into the framework of the mixed reality continuum and complement this with concrete development support through a system design pattern that extends the well established model-view-controller pattern from software engineering. The approach is demonstrated with the development of interaction techniques and the corresponding control strategies for an unmanned aerial vehicle.
Modern automobiles contain more and more mechatronical components to support the task of driving. Such mechatronical components are, e.g., an anti-lock braking system (ABS) and an electronic stability program (ESP) to support driving safety, or a predictive advanced front lighting system P-AFS) to enhance the lighting capabilities of a vehicle on a winding road. P-AFS uses GPS-data to locate the vehicle’s position plus digital map data to predict the curvature of the road in front of the vehicle. Based on this, P-AFS predicts the road scenario and swivels the front headlights accordingly. That way, the headlights follow the road’s curvature and optimally illuminate the road in front of the vehicle. To design, evaluate, and optimize the control algorithms within the electronic control unit (ECU) of the P-AFS component, up to 30 design variables need to be adjusted and tuned to ensure an optimal response of the system to the current road scenario. For this task, numerous time-consuming and costly test drives at night are necessary. This paper introduces a Virtual Reality-based night drive simulator that visualizes the complex lighting characteristics of automotive headlights in high detail and in real-time on a PC-based system. The user drives a simulated vehicle over a virtual test track at night, the vehicle’s motion directly influences the lighting direction of headlights, and the effect of the vehicle dynamics on the lighting can be evaluated directly in the simulator. The system is connected to the control algorithms of a P-AFS component to control the headlights swivelling for a close-to-reality simulation of a P-AFS based lighting system during the simulated night drive. That way, good combinations of the design variables can be found, based on virtual night drives in the simulator system, and the number of real test drives can be reduced significantly. Promising combinations of the design variables then can be validated in a test vehicle during a real test drive a night.
For the development of new automobile lighting systems, special raytracing methods are needed to create physically correct simulations of the illumination properties. For further evaluation, test drives with physical prototypes are still necessary. But changing weather and lighting conditions make the test drive results not fully comparable. Therefore, a high number of test drives have to be performed. This leads to a costintensive and time-consuming development process. Virtual test drives at night combined with a realistic simulation of a lighting system’s illumination characteristics can minimize the number of real nightdrives and allow reproducible testing conditions as well as comparable results. A close-to-reality simulation poses high demands on real-time methods for calculating and displaying illumination data in a virtual scene. Furthermore, the geometry model of the scenery which is to be illuminated needs to be adapted to fulfill these demands. This paper introduces a real-time illumination method for use in a nightdrive simulation which illuminates scenery models using coarse polygon meshes.
Interconnected basic vehicle functions, such as braking, steering and driving, have great potential to improve vehicle safety and comfort. In order to design and test the necessary control functions, a fully active X-by-wire test vehicle (“Chamaeleon”) has been developed. However, while demonstrating the vehicle’s capabilities with real test drives is of high risk, a driving simulator that integrates the entire vehicle provides safe conditions for interactive demonstration test drives — even for untrained drivers. In this paper, we introduce a driving simulator that is composed of Virtual Reality-based simulation software and the Chamaeleon test vehicle. This provides a prototyping and demonstration platform for integrated vehicle-dynamics control functions. Therefore, we enhanced an existing driving simulator. Moreover, we realized control functions in order to utilize the Chamaeleon’s active suspension to provide a motion platform with three degrees-of-freedom. The driving simulator has proven well as a demonstration platform during two international industry fairs. Here, the main goal was, to interactively illustrate the unconventional steering strategies as well as dedicated functionalities of the Chamaeleon. Although the achieved motion feedback is not very realistic, the presence of motion was very welcomed by fair attendees, who performed a simulated test drive. Additionally, first tests have shown that the driving simulator can be used as a prototyping platform. Here, complex control functions can be tested on actual vehicle hardware, while driving in a secured synthetic environment. This enables engineers to instantly perceive the impacts of the control algorithms on the behavior of the vehicle. This facilitates the development process.
This work describes the conception and prototypic implementation of a program to simulate the dynamics within a rail-based undercarriage in real time. A software library for real time simulation of multibody systems (MBS) and a library to create Virtual Reality (VR) applications, function as a basis for this work. The main emphasis lies on the integration of the multibody-simulation into an interactive 3D environment to enable the user to interact with the model and its dynamics simulation in real time. The basic idea of this paper is to simulate a simplified dynamics model of a virtual prototype only as precise as necessary to obtain a better understanding of the prototype’s dynamics. The level-of-detail technique, frequently being used when CAD data is prepared for the use in VR, is utilized here on the simplified dynamics model of a virtual prototype.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.