On 6/19/07, Roberto Inzerillo wrote:
> OTOH one important question to consider is whether a vehicle FDM in
> FlightGear should attempt to model real physics or be more like a
> earth-bound UFO.
>
> Anders
Hi Anders,
Let me chime in with a quick comment. There are quite a few people doing
driving simulation based research. Vehicles and the environments we drive
through are a huge part of our lives. Unfortunately, a distressing number
of people are hurt or killed in vehicles. There is a ton of research going
on to try to improve safety by improving road layouts, markings, and
signage, adding technology to vehicles (i.e. warning systems if you drift
out of your lane or are approach the vehicle ahead of you too quickly,
etc.) Also people are looking at the effects of various imparements such as
fatigue, alcohol, cell phones, or various physical ailments.
In addition to all of that, I've seen driving sims used for obvious things
like driver training, but also non-obvious things like rehabilitating
certain types of injuries, or testing people if they are safe to drive after
enduring certain types of injuries (i.e. a shoulder injury ... can you react
quickly and spin the wheel in an accident likely scenario? Or maybe can you
drive safely after enduring a stroke? Or after starting some new medication
...?) There are also more advanced types of training such as for truck
drivers where the risks of a dumb mistake are even greater than with a
lighter vehicle. Our local airport (KMSP) has a big fire engine simulator
that they use to train anyone that needs to drive a vehicle on airport
grounds. They have an incredibly detailed 3d model of the MSP airport (yeah
I was drooling) down to correct placement of every light and every sign. I
heard they paid a guy to come out and take 3000+ daytime photos and a
similar number of night time photos to build the 3d world. They use this
simulator to train drivers to navigate the maze of taxiways and service
roads and practice interacting with the tower. Have a service vehicle go
the wrong way at an airport could be just as devistating as having a pilot
taxi the wrong way ... and this can become really difficult in low
visibility situations (we can have significant snow storms here in the
winter.)
Most of the groups doing vehicle based research or training already have
solutions in place. There are a couple high buck vendors selling simulators
and software systems, and there are a couple really cheesy low end systems
that some people suffer through. However, I hear over and over again that
it would be really nice to have a full featured, advanced, open-source
driving sim software infrastructure.
So often researchers do actual real research. I know that might be
surprising to some folks who are familiar with the industry. :-) But
research implies doing something new or something different than before.
Now mix that with a closed-source proprietary software system and your hands
could be tied for doing what you need to do. Or if you hit a show stopping
bug late in the development of a project, it stinks when the solution is out
of your hands. Our software vendor on occasion has offered to fix bugs for
us, but they often view the fix as a "new feature" and we wouldn't see it
for 6 months when the next version is released. I don't mean that as a
negative comment towards our software vendor, it's just a fact of life in
the proprietary world.
If we added some "realistic" automobile/truck dynamics with both manual and
automatic transmissions, perhaps the ability to pull a trailer, and some
sort of reasonable skid model, we would suddenly be very far down the path
towards supporting those folks that are doing driving sim based research and
training. So if realistic vehicle dynamics is something that anyone out
there is interested in, I would strongly encourage you to push foward. I
think over time we could develop a significant following in the surface
based transportion world.
(Sorry this message was supposed to be quick, but got longer the more I
typed.) :-)
Regards,
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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