Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - June 2023 - 24

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINTS
Driver-in-the-loop for off-highway
development
Industrial and agricultural vehicle engineers can draw many of the same benefits
from a driving simulator as passenger-car development teams.
by Dennis Marcus
This simulator, in combination with
a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test system,
is being used primarily to validate
tractor cabin ECUs (electronic
control units) and HMI. The complex
HMI of a tractor cab must be easy to
use but also integrate seamlessly with
any number of implements from multiple
suppliers.
Simulating a tractor
Forward-thinking industrial
and agricultural machinery
OEMs and suppliers are
starting to adopt simulators
for engineering applications.
D
river-in-the-loop (DIL) simulators have become
an essential tool for passenger-car
OEMs and suppliers, for cutting development
time and cost and delivering a better
product. In the past 20 years, the driving simulator
has evolved from a vehicle-dynamics tool mostly
used in a motorsport or high-performance context,
to an essential component of the development landscape
- a focal point that interfaces seamlessly with
other engineering tools to deliver effective advanced
driver assistance systems (ADAS), human-machine
interface (HMI) and more. Engineers and management
teams can get behind the wheel of a prototype
vehicle much earlier in the development cycle and
reduce the number of physical prototypes.
As in the motorsport world, DIL simulators have
long been deployed by industrial and agricultural
machinery makers as operator training tools. Now,
forward-thinking OEMs and suppliers are starting to
adopt them for engineering applications, too. Last
year, simulator designer, manufacturer and integrator
Cruden, which is based in the Netherlands, delivered
its first simulator to a large multinational
industrial and agricultural vehicle manufacturer.
24 June 2023
Dennis Marcus, product manager
at Cruden.
" Extended reality
(XR) may offer
an alternative to
conventional visuals
in applications where
driving dynamics are
secondary to effective
machinery operation. "
The hexapod motion system selected
for the simulator has the necessary
payload capacity to carry a full tractor
cab mockup on its top platform. The
configuration enables cabs to be
switched out depending on which
tractor is being tested. With the physical
cab in place, its ECUs, screens and
operator controls are integrated with a
plant model of the entire tractor so
that the DIL can virtually pilot the
tractor while testing and validating
the electronics.
The simulator, located in Europe,
also is used in a vehicle-dynamics application
to assess ride comfort. To
facilitate this, Cruden created a digital
twin of the manufacturer's proving
grounds so that real and virtual tractors
can be driven repeatably on the
same test tracks. Not only can the
comfort of new tractor designs be assessed
in the simulator, but back-toback
comparisons can be made with
competitor vehicles, too. After recording
rivals' performance over the bumps
in instrumented drives on the actual
proving ground, the benchmarks can
be replayed on the simulator.
This benefits the engineering team
during development, as well as members
of management during sign-off. Both
groups can easily compare the performance
of a new design to that of the
competition. In the future, the simulator
could even be used for target-setting at
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
FROM TOP: CNH INDUSTRIAL; CRUDEN
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - June 2023

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