A VR-Based Prototyping and Demonstration Platform Integrating a Fully Active X-by-Wire Test Vehicle

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.