Testing’s new dome of dreams - National Advanced Driving Simulator; includes related article on simulators
NADS, America’s newest vehicle dynamics simulator, targets automaker and supplier use.
In movieland, if you build a baseball park built in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, they will come. But if you build one of the world’s most advanced vehicle dynamics simulators in Iowa City, Iowa, one that costs taxpayers $45 million, will automakers and suppliers come? That’s what the U.S. government and Iowa officials are hoping, roughly a year before the NADS, the National Advanced Driving Simulator, opens for business.
Whether the automotive industry doesn’t know about NADS, or doesn’t care about it, is still an open question. “It’s not so clear as to what their intentions are,” says Edward Haug, director of the NADS and Simulation Center at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “We’re working with them to make sure they understand the capabilities of the device, with the hope they’ll come on board and be users. It’s a marketing issue.”
Asked if the Iowa location is a deterrent, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) NADS Program Manager Keith Brewer scoffs at the idea. “We all know they (automakers) ship cars all over the country. They ship them to Canada in the winter and the southwest in the summer.”
From the beginning, he says, the department has wanted the car companies to avail themselves of the simulator. “It will be open to anybody who is willing to come and pay a user fee,” Brewer says, “We’ve designed the NADS to have a production capacity of two shifts a day, five days a week. There’s going to be a lot of time available.”
The sprawling device, featuring an advanced 360-degree graphic dome capable of holding a 3,500 pound vehicle and moving it across the breadth of six lanes of traffic, is scheduled to be operational in April 2000. The building is expected to be completed this month. Assembly of the motion and computer systems are slated for November. Once open, NHTSA gets two-thirds of the simulator time for basic and applied highway safety research, and the University of Iowa has the remaining third, a portion of which can be fanned out to automakers.
According to the government, NADS will provide the capability for safely evaluating advanced vehicle communication, navigation, and control technologies which are now being developed as part of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) program, in addition to offering the capability to study driver crash-avoidance behavior and carry out related accident reconstruction. And in terms of infrastructure, highway researchers will be able to evaluate alternative designs for intersections, entrances and exits, tunnel and bridge alignments, traffic control devices and highway signing without the expense of actual construction.
“NADS will be the ideal tool to explore these systems,” says August Burgett, chief of the NHTSA’s Light Vehicle Dynamics and Simulation Division
The University of Iowa was selected for the NADS site based on recommendations by the National Science Foundation, which helped NHTSA conduct a national competition among major transportation research universities for the potential site for the NADS. The University of Iowa agreed to put up $11.58 million for the NADS project, which includes design and construction of a $5.7 million building — something that top contender, the University of Michigan, was unwilling to do at the time of the competition.
TRW Systems Integration Group has a $34 million contract for final design and construction of the sprawling device at the university. TRW is responsible for systems engineering and integration and is also responsible for the operator station, researcher interface, overall simulator control and safety monitoring, performance assessment and data collection.
MTS Systems of Eden Prairie, Minn. is building the motion subsystem, while Evans & Sutherland of Salt Lake City, Utah, is responsible for the CGI and visual display systems, including fabrication of the dome.
Initially, four vehicles specially prepared by Dynamic Research, Inc. of Torrance, Calif., will be using the facility first. They will have special instrumentation and modifications for a secure tie-down to the baseplate. The first model up is a ‘96 Ford Taurus sedan. A Jeep Cherokee, a compact passenger car and a Freightliner truck tractor, will also be prepared for use in the simulator.
Iowa’s Haug says automotive Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies are major potential customers for the facility. But some big suppliers have the same idea. Last month Johnson Controls (JCI) launched a $3.5 million comfort engineering center in Plymouth, Mich. The 3,200-square-foot facility — staffed by 12 full-timers — features a driving simulator that the company claims replicates the sights, sounds, forces and vibrations that drivers and passengers experience under all possible road, traffic and weather conditions.
Kuntal Thakurta, manager of the JCI center, says it includes a six-axis, hydraulic shaker table, a vehicle cabin with two rows of seating from a small car, medium-sized car, or sport-utility vehicle, wrap-around, audio/video projection system that includes a rear-view screen, and a computer-controlled integration system.