Comfort Evaluation on a Dynamic Driving Simulator with Advanced Tire, Road and Vehicle Models

The topics of automated driving and digitization are becoming increasingly important and have the potential to shape the future of mobility. Concurrently, manufacturers want to continue to differentiate themselves through driving characteristics typical of their brands. Rapid developments regarding technological changes as well as legal regulations combined with short development times present new challenges for the entire automotive industry. In this context, virtualization and front-loading methods play a major role within the vehicle development. There has been a clear trend of pushing virtual development via simulation to reduce the number of necessary prototypes. However, since both engineers and management still rely heavily on the crucial insights gained by real road tests, subjective closed-loop assessment must remain a part of this virtual process. Driving simulators have the potential to bridge these gaps, allowing engineers and test drivers to subjectively experience and assess new systems in an early virtual phase of development.

Kempten University of Applied Sciences is working with technology partners to research and further develop their dynamic driving simulator. With the goal to develop use-case specific methods for virtual vehicle development, the simulator’s novel motion platform is used specifically for research projects in areas requiring high dynamic performance such as vehicle dynamics and ride. This paper describes the methods and solutions developed in an R&D project investigating the simulator’s capabilities for ride comfort evaluation, such as primary & secondary ride. With the goal to enable experienced test drivers to perform a subjective ride evaluation in a very early development phase, the simulator’s real-time environment was extended with the highly sophisticated tire model FTire. This paper provides an overview of the system’s performance regarding subjective ride assessment. It presents a brief insight into the detailed road modelling and describes the measures taken to ensure real-time capability of the individual model interfaces. Objective performance evaluation shows the benefit of this work for comfort evaluation in early phases of virtual development.