FUNCTIONAL MECHANICAL DESIGN OF A LOW COST DRIVING SIMULATOR

The work concerns a functional approach to a driving simulator design. Since driving simulators are usually cumbersome and very expensive machines, aim of the research is to conceive a simplified and small simulator to enhance the driving feeling, which for the static simulators based only on virtual reality is very poor. The final goal should be to provide the apparatus to various categories of drivers - eg. truck drivers, disables, young and old peoples, etc - in order to expand the data bases of accidents for road safety, to use it as a teaching tool and a driving ability test. Starting from the analysis of human motion perception and from vehicle dynamics, the synthesis of the simulator has been completed. The system's kinematics and dynamics are analytically described. The system's performances have been analyzed by simulation and the actions transmitted to the driver have been compared with those estimated by means of the multi-body model of the vehicle riding on a selected path. The kinematics of the seat of the driving simulator can be quite different from the kinematics of the car seat: in fact only the actions that can be sensed by the driver need to be approximately reproduced and not necessarily the kinematics. This allows the simulator designer to adopt special design approaches which minimize the mechanical requirements of the system.