In addition to the analysis of human driving behavior or the development of new advanced driver assistance systems, the high simulation quality of today’s driving simulators enables investigations of selected topics pertaining to driving dynamics. With high reproducibility and fast generation of vehicle variants the subjective evaluation process leads to a better system understanding in the early development stages.
The transfer of the original on-road test run to the virtual reality of the driving simulator includes the full flexibility of the vehicle model, the maneuver and the test track, which allows new possibilities of investigation. With the opportunity of a realistic whole-vehicle simulation provided by the Stuttgart Driving Simulator new analysis of the human’s thresholds of perception are carried out. The thresholds give general information about the perception of vehicle body motion, which are caused by road unevenness or bumps and transferred over the vehicle body to the occupants.
Furthermore, the resulting vehicle body motion due to such road impacts is analyzed in the simulator. Based on real test runs on the autobahn the vehicle’s body motion is measured after overrunning the road unevenness and exactly implemented in the driving simulator. For more detailed evaluation the excitation is divided into single impulses according to the vehicle’s degrees of freedom. In the present case rolling and yawing motion are considered separately. The driver can modify amplitude and phase of the single impulses by control elements to get an immediate subjective impression of the resulting vehicle motion. A detailed five-mass vehicle model, synthesized road profiles and measured road excitations provide the basis of this analysis to obtain more realistic results. With this method new objective criteria can be derived to enhance the basic design of driving dynamics.
