Design and Development of a Vehicle Dynamics Model for a Drive Simulator

The primary objective of this project is to design and develop a basic vehicle dynamics model so that it can be implemented in a novel drive simulator using a parallel manipulator. An electric car is selected since electric vehicles have reduced complexities, such as automatic gear box etc. chassis, suspension, drive train, steering and braking system are modeled to represent the car. MATLAB was used to model each of these subsystems. For each model, dynamic equations are generated and simulated in SIMULINK. Validity of each of the models is verified by comparing the results with the other ideal vehicle dynamics models or car dynamics model available through graphs and/or tabular data. Since procurement of steering, brakes, and accelerator are costly, we tried to imitate them by potentiometer for steering and throttle, push switch for brakes, electric motors for wheels and servo motor for steering mechanism. Then inputs are given from these three sources to the SIMULINK. The program accepts these hardware inputs and the vehicle dynamic model gives predicted output. The inputs are varied depending upon different road conditions and inputs from the driver. Then this output is fed to the electrical hard wares. The generated VDM is found to be behaving satisfactorily.