Slashdot Mirror
F1 Simulators Revealed
An anonymous reader writes "Racecar Engineering has posted an exclusive look inside the simulator of a leading grand prix team. Particularly interesting is that the Formula 1 team uses software based on the free simulator Racer (with source code available) albeit with a custom vehicle model and hardware interface via CAN-bus. The article highlights the importance that mainstream racing sims (rFactor, iRacing) have in simulation at the pinnacle of the worlds most advanced sport."
Along similar lines, reader PatPending writes "Engineers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany (surely the greatest of all institutes) have turned a massive robot arm into a Ferrari F1 simulator, discovering a new strain of awesome in the process. The contraption, known as the CyberMotion Simulator, consists of an industrial robotic arm fitted with a racing seat, a force feedback steering wheel and a 3D simulation of the Monza Formula 1 track beamed from a projector on to a curved display."
I thought F1 was the help key? I guess people in simulators need help too.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
While we're on the subject, let me give a plug to the fine folks who make the Inside Sim Racing video podcast. Not the best production quality, and they're definitely a little on the dorky side. But they're passionate about sim racing and racing games and they do an excellent job covering the field.
Most of the industry is using rF Pro. Despite the constant negativity around the tyre/aero maps with the baseline version of rFactor, I've always been of the opinion that rF is the most scalable sim around. Nice to see RaceCarEngineering get a plug, also. Those guys do good work.
Posting to remove an accidental mod.
C'mon, this is nothing but PR hyperbole. F1 may be nice to watch, but innovation never occurs here. On the contrary; for instance, it only took them 30 years to discover the existence of automatic clutches... And I'm not (only) trolling.
That in a country that was just told by the government of the EU to violate the Maastricht limit and increase their debt to GDP ratio to 90% (instead of the cap at 60%) by taking on bad debt from WestLB and Hypo Real Estate, they still have money for this. Because in Europe most universities and their expensive research programs are fully dependent on government subsidies. You tax dollars at work. Or at play, in this case. At least every German citizen should get to have a go for free.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The CyberMotion Simulator isn't the first to use an industrial robot as the motion platform for a game. When I visited Legoland (Billund) in 2004, they had several robots set up as a thrillride, with the robot going through a user-programmable motion pattern.
Most advanced != most left turns
I'm not sure that is true. At the incident at 00:51, the arm is moving to the left of picture, and then suddenly starts moving to the right. It is the acceleration that counts, not the position or speed. The sudden acceleration from moving left to moving right appears to happen right on the moment the driver turns the wheel; the fact that it takes the arm some time to move to the right of picture is irrelevant.
In another iteration of the company I work for (we've had a few mergers), one of the divisions ran a centrifuge for human factors research on pilots. Then someone had the bright idea to turn the technology, and software into an amusement park ride.
It had an enclosed gondola with six axis movement and a display inside to show the environment that was being simulated. The arm spun at a constant rate, and with the gondola at a certain angle it could trick the inner ear to think you were sitting still while you were turning. And then by changing the the angle of the gondola in relation to the centrifugal force vector it could give the sensation of roll, pitch and yaw.
Although the tech was cool, and some parks showed some interest. It never went anywhere because they couldn't figure out a way to get the throughput that the park operators where looking for.
Sounds like that system would be the best of both methods mentioned in the summary.
I want to shoot the messenger!
Forget the simulator part! Give me an office chair strapped to the robot arm...Imagine delivering those TPS reports without getting up!
FTFA: "As a result, there appears to be some delay between the movements on the steering wheel and the sudden, mechanised lurches of the robot arm."
The Acceleration of the arm is what provides the feeling of being pushed out of the corner, not the Speed of it. As far as I can tell from the video, the timing of this is almost perfect.
of a dorky kid aged 16 who in 1969 had a 'flight' in the rear seat of an RAF Phantom F4 Simulator on his first day at work.
Maybe that inspired me to get a degree in Control Systems Engineering and get involved with real Aircraft Avionic Systems design ever since?
Back on topic.
The Motion system used in the car simulator is clearly based upon the '6-axis' Link Miles design of the early 1970's and adopted by most European Flight Simulator makers since (Redifon, Thales etc)
According to Paolo Robuffo Giordano, the man behind the project, the arm has a much larger motion envelope than rival systems, and "allows subjects to be freely displaced in six degrees of freedom in space and even to be placed upside-down".
so it could like, simulate a crash? ugh.
it would be way cooler to use it in a game where spinning in the air is part of the racing element.
Was a few years back, and involved you getting into an accident and having the car fly up off the track, and pirouette in the air fr 15 minutes as it fell through the scenery and everything spun around you....hopefully it's been much improved since then.
The engineers at the Max Planck Institute suck at driving.
It would only be an accurate simulation of an F1 car if there were slow, single gear F1 cars.
This sentence no verb.
David Coultard was about to race at Monaco, but he had never raced there before, so he fired up the Microprose F1 Grand Prix to get used to the course, and won it too!
Slashdot using the OSI logo as their topic icon for a project which, on it's license page, states an awful lot of confused ideas about what open source might mean, seems a little odd, not to mention the whole not being released under an OSI recognised open source license thing. If people are going to write custom licenses i do wish they'd put some effort into it.
All these simulators can load a driver to 1g laterally (by tipping him sideways). The cars themselves can sustain ~5g laterally in a long high radius corner.
Same considerations apply for acceleration and deceleration. Simulation can be useful anyways.
I'm not. Not at all.
The high reliance on simulators is not necessarily because it is in any way better than physical testing. The FIA now severely limit the amount of physical testing that can be done.
It's now regular for a team to receive updated parts mid week straight from the factory and the first real-world testing is the Friday practice session, the day before qualifying. This Friday is effectively the only testing day, since the car you complete your time in during qualifying is literally put in a bag and only opened shortly before the race. This is also why drivers who for whatever reason have no chance of gaining anything from finishing a race do so anyway; they use it as free testing time.
It's all about vectors, not positions. The sim. looked fine to me.
No sig today...
What brings a package like Racer to a level usable by F1 teams is not so much the software itself (even though the openness of it helps), but the data that it is being fed by the team and their suppliers (e.g. performance and feedback data from the car, professional track scans, etc.).
Since the casual user does NOT have access to these data set, all they're left with is the "empty sheet of paper", on which they can paint their own fantasies, but, just because they're using the same "paper" as a race team, this does not mean that the outcome (the simulation feel) will be the same as that of an F1 team.
So - unless you have some realistic data to plug into it (and to test in real-life feedback loops), don't be under any illusion that it's any better than any other racing sim.
>Any good car racing sims that work with linux?
Don't know how good they are, but there are TORCS http://torcs.sourceforge.net/ and its fork Speed Dreams http://www.speed-dreams.org/
Cultist of the Average Middle-Aged Ones
Many military simulators have X-Plane code at their heart, so why not racing?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Ironic that this comes up on Slashdot at the same time that I learned about a Canadian company opening up with a hexatech simulator - Technologies ERS. Apologies for the site being in french - they're based in Quebec. Still, it's a damn cool machine.