Practical Feasibility and Functional Safety of a Wheeled Mobile Driving Simulator

The automotive development focus shifts from advanced driver assistance systems to-wards automated driving, as can easily be concluded from daily news. While the valida-tion and verification of driver assistance systems is already challenging, the question of how to validate automated driving is still unanswered. Nevertheless, it is widely agreed that the importance of Driving Simulators (DS) for the validation of driver assistance systems will increase even further for the validation of automated driving. Still, state-of-the-art DS are in a deadlock when it comes to providing the demanded quality in motion representation because larger workspaces are needed but cannot be provided economical-ly, thus, impeding validity of DS results and calling for a ground-breaking concept. A Wheeled Mobile DS (WMDS) is researched at FZD to replace state-of-the-art DS while providing an at least equal immersion to the test person with reduced costs. There-fore, this thesis investigates the superordinate project goal of proving feasibility of WMDS from two viewpoints: Firstly, is the wheeled motion base practically capable of providing the horizontal dynamics as they would occur in a real car in the aspects power demand, energy demand, and motion latency. Secondly, what measures are needed to reduce the risk that arises from the unbound system to an acceptable level and how are these measures triggered and monitored, ergo: How would a safety architecture need to look like for a WMDS? The first research question is addressed by conducting driving manoeuvres with the scaled WMDS prototype MORPHEUS. As unscaled urban driving manoeuvres cannot be driv-en with MORPHEUS, since the available driving areas are not large enough, a pow-er/energy model is developed, parameterised, and validated, enabling the simulation of the unscaled energy demand and of the power demand in dependence of the scaling factor. Concluding, the requirements to power and energy demand as well as motion latency can be fulfilled by state-of-the-art technology. To answer the second research question, a state-of-the-art hazard and risk analysis has been conducted and safety requirements have been derived. An overall safety architecture is designed for these safety requirements, whereas the core element is an autarchic emer-gency braking system. An exemplary design of this safety architecture is investigated and evaluated in terms of risk reduction and additional hazards arising from the newly intro-duced functions and components, yielding that no unacceptable risk is inherited in the system. Concluding, the herein presented work provides the next building block towards proving general feasibility of WMDS and, thus, towards revolutionising DS technology.