I'd like to do a quick informal poll here.
My day job involves maintaining and managing an advanced research driving
simulator:
http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/Facilities/index.html
There has been some vague discussions here in my lab about launching a
project to create some sort of open-source driving simulator software
targetted towards research applications (i.e. open-ended, interfaceable,
highly scriptable, highly adaptable.) FlightGear seems like it could be a
very logical starting point.
So I am wondering if anyone out there would have any particular interest in
adapting flightgear to accurate simulate surface vehicles and perhaps
develop a better infrastructure for representing roadway environments,
traffic, signs, signal lights, etc. My mind goes to all the animation and
scripting abilities we already have with FlightGear, the ability to drive
multiple displays/monitors, our mutliplayer capability, our weather and time
of day effects, etc. We would need a more accurate vehicle dynamics model
(or extensions to existing models to model car engines and transmissions.)
We may (or may not) need to do some work generating more rich and detailed
roads and road environments. Finally (and this is probably the hardest task
by far as I'm sure Durk could attest to) we would ultimately want a very
realistic "AI" traffic simulation ... cars that follow the rules of the
road, obey signal lights, avoid accidents, don't have distracting behavior
bugs, have tunable aggressiveness levels, have realistic variations ... i.e.
cars stopped at an intersection don't all have exactly the same lane offset
and gap spacing ... I could go on and on ... merging behavior, round abouts,
properly interacting with pedestrian traffic, bicycles on the shoulder,
trains, etc. This gets really hard, really fast.
So I would be interested if there is anyone out there that would be
especially interested in adapting FlightGear for car/truck type simulation,
especially if your interest level (and available time) might push you to the
point of being willing to contribute to such an effort.
Thanks,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson - University of Minnesota - FlightGear Project
http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/ http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
http://www.flightgear.org
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