Heavy Vehicle Simulator

[Giordano Thibault]

Simbio is the fusion of all these realities, a simulator that allows drivers of urban and inter-urban buses, lorries, trailers, vehicles carrying hazardous goods and many others to train for all the circumstances and conditions they face in their everyday professional lives.

The sense of motion inside a vehicle is an essential part of the sensations and decisions we experience when driving. LANDER's automotive simulators therefore incorporate a motion system capable of reproducing the effects of accelerating and breaking, driving on curves, potholes and many other items in a highly realistic way.

We have developed a motion system with three degrees of motion for our car simulator that allows for the experience of even terrain, driving on curves or the sensations of accelerating and breaking, among other things.

Research on pavement wear using the HVS started in South Africa in the 1960s. Prior to this, South African road designers used data from testing done in Illinois in the USA to quantify the effects of heavily loaded vehicles on our roads. The CSIR realised that the conditions in Illinois were very different to those in South Africa, and so started to develop a South African testing facility. The local pavement design approach during the 1960s was to develop an analytical design procedure in which the engineering characteristics of pavement materials could be used together with mathematical modelling to predict or analyse pavement performance. Due to the high running costs from using normal trucks and the long periods of time needed before road failures were observed, the CSIR instead developed a vehicle for accelerated pavement testing (APT). This led to the first HVS, Mark I, which was built in 1967. The Mark I model was a stationary testing device and was used on the CSIR campus.

The fully mobile Mark II HVS was later built in 1970 to understand, for instance, the unforeseen increased road damage caused by heavy trucks carrying coal from Emalahleni to the East Rand. With the Mark II, the CSIR came to understand the causes of pavement damage much more comprehensively, leading to the development of the South African mechanistic pavement design method, which is still used internationally by pavement engineers today. The success of the Mark II led to the CSIR commissioning three more vehicles between 1976 and 1978 with an improved design, designated the Mark III.

Testing of pavements carried out by the CSIR using the HVS helps to reduce construction and lifecycle costs of roads and road infrastructure, reduce or limit early pavement failure, and optimise pavement design and maintenance.

The HVS is a large vehicle that subjects pavements to accelerated wear and tear, of the sort they would experience over 20 years, in a three to six-month time frame. The information gathered using the HVS provides engineers with information about weaknesses in pavement design, be it due to traffic, unusual loads or environmental conditions. The HVS can also be used to evaluate runways and landing strips for aircraft.

This information allows researchers to test new low-cost or advanced road construction materials quickly and effectively, as well as develop and improve on design and maintenance practices to limit costs of pavement design failure.

Over the last few decades, the ATP research group has partnered with an international company, Dynatest Consulting, to produce HVS vehicles for international markets; in addition, international collaboration has seen South African pavement testing practices, developed at the CSIR, have a major impact on pavement design and testing around the world.

The HVS Mark III is 23 m long, 3.7 m wide and 4.2 m high. It can test roads using dual truck wheels, super single tyres or aircraft wheels with a loading range of between 20 and 210kN. Loading can be applied in one or both directions. Channelled traffic or wheel wander patterns can also be simulated.

To simulate the damaging effects of the environment, a specially-designed environmental chamber is used. In this chamber, testing temperatures can be varied between sub-zero to over 65C. Water can also be introduced on the surface or underneath the pavement to study the damaging effects of water entering the pavement structure.

In addition to the MarkVI, two extraordinary size HVS models (HVS MarkVI-A) have been developed and sold to particularly evaluate aircraft loads on runways and taxiways. The latest model was sold to the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA. This unit is the largest HVS to date with a total length of 36.9 m and can apply wheel loads of up to 450KN.

TecknoSIM Truck Driving Simulator is an actual replica of a vehicle with real controls and advance driving physics to provide an immersive driving experience. The simulator is scalable and designed for training and assessment of professional truck drivers on commercial vehicles like rigid truck, articulated truck, tipper truck, electric truck & military truck. Customized software & digital twins of terrains making it suitable for both left and right-hand driving countries.

Training on TecknoSIM Truck Driving Simulators has improved the training quality and safety of our fleet. Along with multiple driving training scenarios, clinical tests like the vision test and reaction tests on the simulator have been extremely helpful in understanding the driving abilities and skills of our truck drivers . With regular training on heavy vehicle driving simulators , we wish promote safe driving habits amongst our truck drivers

We deeply appreciate the participation of your team in the upgradation of Technical Institutes of North East India and for your passionate work towards achieving spectacular success for the project of National interest.

Researchers affiliated with the laboratory are concerned with studying transportation operations and safety issues from a multi-modal perspective. The high fidelity simulators allow researchers to evaluate many more scenarios that would be practically possible in other experimental mediums while simultaneously controlling for extraneous variables. As a result, drivers and bicyclists can be exposed to risky scenarios that would be either very difficult or impossible to evaluate in the real world.

The OSU Heavy Vehicle Driving Simulator (FAAC/Realtime Technologies TT-1000) is designed to give operators an authentic driving experience. Multiple high-definition displays give an expansive, geometrically correct +210 field-of-view with adjustable inset mirrors. The cab is generic, approximating many Heavy Vehicle makes and models. Our simulator operates with SimDriver and SimADAS, meaning that the vehicle can function at varying levels of automation, promoting the study of automated systems in a heavy vehicle cab. The Heavy Vehicle Driving Simulator is networked with our Passenger Car Driving and Bicycling simulators so that networked simulation studies can be conducted with all three or any two simulators in the same virtual environment.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development Michael McCormack said the cutting-edge simulator would help existing and learner heavy vehicle drivers navigate the South Eastern Freeway descent, with a focus on improving safety behind the wheel.

South Australian Minister for Police, Emergency Services, Correctional Services and Road Safety Vincent Tarzia said the South Australian Government would contribute a further $100,000 for the simulator to ensure heavy vehicle drivers were well prepared.

SARTA President Sharon Middleton AM said this HVSim project will be the first in the country used by the industry for training on specific high-risk routes, including the SE Freeway as well as other problematic routes in SA and interstate.

We welcome the commitment of the Federal and SA Governments to this important and innovative safety project which we could not undertake without their combined $450,000 in grants. The industry has committed a further $100,000 to the project to fund additional simulations and a purpose-built trailer to enable us to take make the HVSim available to drivers and operators around the state and interstate.

In a further preventative measure, the simulator has potential to assist research into driver behaviours. The Centre for Automotive Safety Research (CASR) and the will have access to the simulator to conduct testing on proposed road designs.

ECA contributes to the French Army's Vulcain Platform, by implementing an Army Logistics Heavy Vehicle simulator, EF-Truck NG, to fit into a virtual convoy driven by an Army logistics soldier, led in a collaborative simulation (15 simulations means in network).

As an expert in driving simulators, ECA Group takes in consideration all the required parameters (detailed graphism, accurate physical model, vehicle dynamics, etc.) to ensure an efficient training in the French Army provided virtual environment.

The expertise brought by ECA Group's know-how in driving simulation permits to recreate very realistically the reponse of an Logistic Vehicle, and especially when driven in harsh environments (unpaved roads with deep sand, mud, ditches etc.)

Coming soon, with the arrival of the Scorpion program and the preparation for operation, a new step will be taken in the development of simulation through the interconnection of means.

As part of this programme aiming to increase the simulation training capabilities of the French Armed Forces, the challenge was to interconnect several simulators from different companies and of different types (helicopter / vehicles ...) to share the same virtual environment in real-time.

The goal of developping such a simulation platform is to enable physically distant corps of Armies to work together on joint-army scenarii to increase their efficiency during on-field exercices.

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