Using Modelica for Interactive Simulations of Technical Systems in a Virtual Reality Environment

Simulation has become an essential tool in the development of construction machinery. In addition to the validation of technical features, the assessment of man-machine interaction has become more important within complex working environments. In cases where most attention is paid to the human as the operator, simulations have to fulfil special requirements. Allowing the user to interact with the system implies the need for real time simulation as well as flexible hardware integration and a powerful visualisation. Therefore a modular software framework called SARTURIS 3 has been developed meeting all these requirements. In order to support flexible multidomain modelling the Modelica language is being used. This paper presents SARTURIS and its applications, focusing on the integration of Modelica based on OpenModelica using the example of a wheel loader. Since OpenModelica is not yet able to deal with the Modelica Multibody library, a Python-based tool called PyMbs has been developed. It allows comfortable description of multibody systems and export to Modelica code as well