A novel method for the evaluation of driving simulator performances

The use of driving-simulator is increasing wide-spreading in the whole automotive sector. The adoption of driving simulator indeed allows evaluating the design choices directly during the design stage thought the man-machine interaction, where “man” means the driver while “machine” means the mathematical model of the car traduced to the driver thought a different machine: the driving simulator. In this research activity a questionnaire was developed to evaluate the performances of a driving simulator focusing on two main aspects. The first one regards the ability of the driving simulator to accurately reproduce the driving feelings without inducing motion sickness sensations. The second instead regards the ability of the driver to objectively judge the vehicle performances throughout a set of parameters. All these aspects were firstly numerically investigated implementing different models showing different dynamics characteristics and successively verified by experimental test at the driving simulator. The drivers scores, about both the accuracy of the mathematical model and the driving simulator, were analysed in order to understand if their feelings match the real behaviour imposed to the car.