55 Dynisma DMG family | Digest assistance and emergency braking to test their impact on driver comfort and safety. “You can replicate how lane keeping affects the driving and what it does to the vehicle,” he says. This allows manufacturers to gather feedback from a diverse group of drivers and fine-tune them to meet user expectations. Additionally, the simulators can simulate Level 4 autonomous driving scenarios, focusing on passenger comfort. Testing these scenarios ensures vehicles offer a pleasant ride, even when passengers are texting or watching a film. “The industry is not going to succeed if everybody feels ill in the cars that are driving themselves,” Holloway adds. Real and virtual sensors The simulators’ hardware-in-the loop capabilities allow real ADAS sensors to be integrated into simulations. “We can mount a physical camera onto the simulator and take feedback from that,” Holloway elaborates. The simulator display’s fidelity is good enough to provide reliable information to the camera, so long as the customerprovided visuals are capable. “We integrate whatever the customer wants to use. Some customers have scanned a city, some have scanned the local roads around their facility, so they have very good visualisations. What the visualisation software guys are now doing is building in things that respond to active sensors,” he says. “There isn’t a real person walking across the road, but the system can give a signal to the Lidar or the radar that says there is.” Evaluating HMI Testing of HMI designs is another area that the DMG simulators support, incorporating physical mock-ups and virtual environments. The physical mock-up replicates the interior of a vehicle, complete with realistic A-pillars, dashboards and control systems, while the virtual environment leverages virtual-reality or mixed-reality headsets. These setups allow manufacturers to evaluate the way drivers interact with various HMI configurations under realistic driving conditions. Holloway stresses the importance of assessing interactions with flat-panel touchscreens versus physical switches, considering how different designs affect usability. “Trying to press a flat-panel instrument button while you’re driving over a cobbled road is going to be pretty difficult.” The simulators enable engineers to evaluate challenges early in the development cycle, avoiding costly design changes later. Additionally, the simulators support eye-tracking technologies, which provide valuable data on how drivers visually engage with the HMI. Engineers can analyse factors such as the placement of displays, reflections and the effects of thicker A-pillars on visibility. The ability to alter variables such as time of day and lighting conditions further enhances the realism and depth of HMI testing. Simulators also improve the sustainability of vehicle development as traditional testing involves transporting them worldwide to assess performance under diverse conditions in a process that incurs substantial carbon emissions. Engineers can replicate environmental conditions such as temperature variations, road grip and weather effectively instantly. “We can change the conditions in the simulator with a click of a button,” he says. Navigating uncertainty As the industry debates the future of propulsion systems, Dynisma’s simulators are well-suited to exploring the whole electrification space for powertrain options, as it is far from inevitable that everything will be a full BEV and the pendulum may swing back to hybrids. “Obviously, there’s a lot of talk in the whole powertrain and vehicle market at the moment, and I think there’s a lot of work to be done in modelling, simulation and development there,” Holloway says. Simulators enable engineers to model and test various hybrid configurations – plug-in, serial and parallel – while examining their effects on energy use and performance. Holloway emphasises the importance of simulation in exploring ‘what if’ scenarios, enabling manufacturers to pivot more quickly in response to market or regulatory changes. Since its founding in 2017, Dynisma has grown rapidly, serving both the automotive and motorsport sectors, and deliveries are scheduled as far ahead as 2026. E-Mobility Engineering | January/February 2025 Dynisma’s simulators support eye-tracking, which is a valuable tool for measuring where drivers spend their attention when they have to interact with the HMI while driving
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