Power, Energy, and Latency Test Drives with the Wheeled Mobile Driving Simulator Prototype MORPHEUS.

This paper presents test drive results for power and energy demand as well as motion latency for the wheeled mobile driving simulator prototype MORPHEUS. Thus, this work further fills the mosaic of theoretical and practical evidence for the conceptual validity of wheeled mobile driving simulators. For evaluating the power demand, a straight-line manoeuvre is driven with MORPHEUS and the main accumulator’s output current and voltage are measured. The initial requirement is not met, because road surface excitations impede tire force transmission at high velocities, and because of the accumulator’s power limit. The energy demand is investigated by validating the virtual prototype’s energy model with measurement data from MORPHEUS, and finally calculating the overall energy demand for an unscaled, representative urban driving scenario with the validated simulation model. The results prove that the requirement can be met by state-of-the-art accumulator technology. Motion cue latency is researched by driving synthetic manoeuvres and measuring the time span from a target input value to certain acceleration thresholds, which are in accordance with state-of-the-art motion latency measurement methods from the automotive industry. The measured latency is below that of regular passenger cars and therewith meets the requirements.