Abstract
Driving simulators are used effectively for vehicle system development, human factor study, and other purposes by enabling to reproduce actual driving conditions in a safe and tightly controlled environment. This paper describes a driving simulator developed for design and evaluation of full- scale driving simulators and for driver-vehicle interaction study. The simulator consists of a real-time vehicle simulation system, a visual and audio system, a motion system, a control force loading system, and an experiment console. The real-time vehicle simulation system supervises overall operation of the simulator and also simulates dynamic motion of realistic vehicle models in real-time. The economical visual system generates high fidelity driving scenes that are displayed on a screen by a projector. The motion system generates realistic motion cue using a six degree-of-freedom Stewart platform driven hydraulically. The control force loading system acts as an interface between a driver and the simulator. The experiment console monitors the status of the simulator in operation and also collects and manages experimental data.