Page 417 - Mechatronics for Safety, Security and Dependability in a New Era

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DESIGN OF LOW-CLEARANCE MOTION PLATFORM FOR
DRIVING SIMULATORS
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H. Mohellebi , S. Espie , A. Kheddar , H. Arioui and A. Amouri 2
1
Insitut National de Recherche des Transports et leur Securite
Arcueil, France
Laboratoire Systemes complexes - CNRS - University of Evry
Evry, France

ABSTRACT
Nowadays, driving simulators are interactive virtual reality tools that are useful in the human factors
studies. The difficulty to reproduce in reality some road situations, mainly for risk and reproducibility
reasons, increases the interest for such a tool. Nevertheless, the validation of the experiments carried
out on driving simulator is closely related to embedding realism of the driver in the simulated world.
Increasing the validity field of such a tool requires integrating the haptic modality and peculiarly
inertia effects feedback. We present the design of a driving simulator enhanced with haptic feedback
and motion platform that allows 3DOF movement restitution (two DOF are exclusive).

KEYWORDS

Driving simulator, motion restitution, virtual reality, washout, dynamic modelling, lane queuing.

INTRODUCTION

Some tasks that are easily achieved in actual driving situations (e.g. lane shift or queuing), become
tedious when they are accomplished using a driving simulator. The lack of coherent sensory stimuli
prevents the driver from an adequate control of the virtual vehicle. In order to drive a virtual vehicle,
the driver needs to be provided with sufficient information which allows him to control the car as
easily as it is the case in most of real situations. Depending on the hardware architecture of each
simulator, the feedback strategies might be different, due to the very fact that the control is based on
sensory-motor activity. Some studies, aiming to highlight the relevance of kinaesthetic perception in
simulator controllability, clearly showed that longitudinal and lateral accelerations significantly reduce
the simulator control variability. Consequently, illusion of inertial effects has to be provided to the
driver. Such illusion rests on acquired knowledge of the human perceptive system. In the case of
continuous accelerations the illusion is generally produced by tilting the driver forward or backward.
Such tilt can be interpreted by his/her vestibule system, as either a positive or a negative acceleration,