Developing an avatar model for driving simulators

Abstract

Driving a vehicle in safety conditions means actually to maintain an equilibrium in a complex system in which the main components are the runway, the vehicle and the driver. The complexity of the situations that could appear, the safety aspects and the continuous technological innovations in automotive industry have imposed the development of technical systems capable in simulating the vehicle driving, i.e. driving simulators. The dynamic pace of automotive development and the increase of safety standards have led to the need to continuously upgrading such devices. In order to reduce development time and resources, a virtual driving simulator is described that allows the user to interact with a computer based simulation (avatar) version, before having to build a full-scale simulator. Thus, the main goal of the current paper is to describe the concept of the avatar driving simulator. This avatar version of a driving simulator, named Computer Avatar Versatile Driving Simulator - (CAV-Drive) is considered to be a computerized model that allows the implementation in a software environment (for example, Matlab) different runway models, vehicles - suspensions, chassis - and driving behaviours for testing and optimisation in the virtual world different types of driving simulators. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.