IMPLEMENTATION OF A DRIVING SIMULATOR BASED ON A STEWART PLATFORM AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS TECHNOLOGIES

This paper describes works related to the development of a land vehicle driving simulator, which consists of a Stewart platform as its motion device and a computer graphical system as its visual component. The main task is to enable the pilot-experience the sensation of motion while driving the vehicle under the constraint of the platform's finite working space. Involved are works such as establishment of the vehicle dynamical model, analysis of the forces acting on the pilot, and application of the washout algorithm and human motion sensation models. With the results from these works, appropriate motion trajectory commands for the platform can be generated. Besides the physical motion part, a computer graphical system is installed to generate scenes that give visual cues. While following the pilot's steering signals and matching the platform's motion, the visual system creates animation scenes of the environment, which are shown on a large screen in front of the pilot through an LCD projector. To test the completed system, different pilots operate it and give subjective assessments. Also, gyros are mounted on the platform to measure its responses to motion commands. Here some experimental results are summarized and discussed.