Experimental setup and testing for verification of similarity between road-tire interaction characteristics of scaled models and full-scale vehicles

This paper presents the setup for conducting experiments, and some results obtained in these experiments, on scaling issues between scaled models and full scale vehicles as they are related to road-tire interactions. The work presented in this paper has profound implications on the applicability of the flexible low-cost automated scaled highway laboratory being developed at Virginia Tech. The laboratory is a proposed 1/15th scale hardware working model of Automated Highway Systems. The vehicles are equipped with ultrasonic sensors for longitudinal guidance. IR and vision system for lateral guidance. They are controlled by HC11 microprocessor boards, and have wireless two way communication infrastructure for vehicle-highway communication. This paper describes the hardware, software, and design issues for the experimental setup and results of some preliminary experiments conducted on scaling issues which provide encouraging results.