A gaming environment approach to analysis of energy storage for electric/hybrid vehicle

A multiplayer gaming environment, combining the multi-disciplinary engineering simulation software, Virtual Test Bed (VTB), and the gaming tool, Unity3D, is introduced to realize the analysis of energy storage for electric/hybrid vehicle through a vehicle driving game. The gaming engine couples the three-dimensional (3D) multibody vehicle system, especially developed in VTB at proper level of complexity for electrical engineers, with the real road information, exported from Google Earth to the 3D visual front-end. Several types of powertrain with energy storage system (ESS) are realized in VTB while advanced users can also conveniently construct their own design from the multi-disciplinary component library. Since the vehicle system is controlled instantaneously from user's gaming controller instead of preloaded sequential events, this gaming environment can be used to study the design of ESS in more real and complicated scenarios or help an individual vehicle owner plan his recharging events before his actual travel.