Study to Assess the Controllability after Chassis Component Damages on the Dynamic Driving Simulator

The demands for shorter development times, reduced costs and prototypes make a greater use of virtual methods in the development process necessary. However, the real driving experience in a road test still offers essential insights for engineers and management. In particular, controllability tests through structurally damaged chassis components are extremely time-consuming in road tests and can therefore only be conducted to a limited extent. Moreover, they are often not reproducible or not representative, since the occurrence of damage is difficult to control over time and the tests can also be dangerous. On the other hand, purely virtual methods cannot adequately represent the driver’s reaction and driver assessment of controllability.

In a feasibility and potential study, solutions and methods based on a dynamic driving simulator were developed. The Driver-in-the-Loop method using a driving simulator enables the precise control of a wide range of damage patterns and a broad spectrum of driving situations, while always offering a high level of safety in the test conduction. In addition, it records the human reaction and makes the controllability subjectively experienceable and assessable. Certain variants can also be presented to the management with this method and made experienceable for the decision-makers. In this way, important decisions and setting the course in the development can be supported. Overall, the method could save a lot of time and money.

The University of Applied Sciences Kempten together with the affiliated institute MdynamiX has build-up a dynamic driving simulator with a novel rail and movement concept, which was designed for vehicle dynamics and enables further applications such as ADAS/AD, HMI, functional safety. The concept was developed by Williams F1 and industrialized by AB Dynamics. The high dynamic visualization and environment simulation with low latency time and high level of details was developed by rFpro. The overall simulator system is characterized by exceptionally high lateral and vertical dynamics and a very realistic vehicle dynamics behavior and related driving experience.

The question now arises whether the controllability in case of vehicle damage can be reliably perform in such a driving simulator. The simulator thus offers good conditions for the study. Therefore a method for model design and simulation of the failure of selected chassis components using the MSC ADAMS Multi-Body Simulation (MBS) environment was developed. Furthermore, a transfer of the vehicle behavior into the simulation environment IPG CarMaker was worked out and the application of the methodology in real-time simulations was verified. Thereby replacement models of the different damages in IPG CarMaker were created, e.g. for the transient and dynamic wheel behavior. These were transferred to the dynamic driving simulator, where they were tested for controllability in the context of “driver-in-the-loop”. In order to be able to compare and validate the controllability between simulator and real test. The controllability tests with several subjects were examined subjectively and objectively and compared with the behavior in the simulator. The paper will present the method and the given results of the study and further potentials for damage and failure possibilities.