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.
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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. |
Human subject in the driving simulator
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| 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. |
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