Virtual Prototyping Simulation for a Passenger Vehicle

The primary goal of virtual prototyping is to eliminate the need for fabricating physical prototypes, and to reduce cost and time for developing new products. A virtual prototyping seeks to create a virtual environment where the development of a new model can be flexible as well as rapid, and experiments can be carried out effectively concerning kinematics, dynamics, and control aspects of the model. This paper addresses the virtual environment used for virtual prototyping of a passenger vehicle. It has been developed using the dVISE environment that provides such useful features as actions, events, sounds, and light features. A vehicle model including features, and behaviors is constructed by employing an object-oriented paradigm and contains detailed information about a real-size vehicle. The human model is also implemented not only for visual and reach evaluations of the developed vehicle model, but also for behavioral visualization during a crash test. For the real time driving simulation, a neural network model is incorporated into the virtual environment. The cases of passing bumps with a vehicle are discussed in order to demonstrate the applicability of a set of developed models.