Implementation of Motion Cueing and Motor Position Control for Vehicle Simulator with 4-DOF-Platform

Vehicle simulator is used for various purposes, mainly driver training and vehicle model test. One of the most important part of vehicle simulator is motion simulator which simulates the vehicle motion. This part makes the user feel the motion sensation given by the real vehicle even though the user is in the simulator platform. The motion simulator itself consists of several subsystems : user interface, dynamic model calculation, motion cueing, and platform control system. This paper explains the implementation and its result of designed motion cueing and the motor position control which is a part of platform control system. The design is implemented on vehicle simulator in Institut Teknologi Bandung which has 4 degrees of freedom for its motion (pitch, roll, sway, and surge). The implemented motion cueing algorithm (MCA) is model predictive control (MPC), an optimization-based motion cueing algorithm. Sliding mode control (SMC) with saturation function is implemented for position control of the motor to solve nonlinear load torque disturbance which appear from a static behaviour when the platform rotates on pitch motion. From the motion cueing result, it can be inferred that MPC-based MCA can track the motion sensation of the real vehicle, especially for the surge and sway motion. For pitch and roll sensation, reference signals with lower frequency yield worse results compared to the signals with higher frequency ones. Meanwhile, from the motor position control result, it can be concluded that SMC with saturation function can track the position reference according to the calculation of motion cueing.