Driving simulator

We built a driving simulator to be used both with human subjects and as a testbed for a driving program. The graphics engine is an SGI Onyx Infinite Reality and the simulator was developed starting from the perfly demo program. The world database contains a description of the environment in which the vehicles navigate, represented as a collection of roads, traffic signs, buildings, etc., with their 3D world coordinates. We are using the Performer Town database from SGI which is an urban environment.

In the first case , a human subject sits in a kart and drives through the virtual environment. The motion of the car is controlled with the gas and brake pedals and the steering wheel. The subject is also wearing a Head Mounted Display and the head position and orientation are monitored with a Polhemus Fastrak device.
Therefore, the subject can turn his head around freely and the images in the HMD are updated accordingly, giving a strong sense of immersion in the environment. The subject's eye movements are monitored with an eye tracker mounted inside the HMD.

camcorder.gif
  (253 bytes) Human subject in the driving simulator (5.5MB Mpeg)

In the second configuration, the simulator is used as a testbed for the autonomous driving program. In this case, the host computer acts as the driver. The host analyses the video output from the simulator using a Datacube MV200 real time image processor with a DigiColor color digitizer. Once the images are analyzed and the current state is estimated, the appropriate commands are sent back to the graphics engine, thus closing the simulation-analysis-control loop. These commands control the vehicle motion and the positioning of the virtual camera.


URCS Home Page