F1 Simulators Revealed 72
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."
But F1? (Score:1, Funny)
J98 (Score:4, Informative)
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No Surprise (Score:2)
Many military simulators have X-Plane code at their heart, so why not racing?
oops. (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Your parent moderated someone, but a moderator can't post in a thread they are modding. If they do, all the moderations get reversed.
Re:Most advanced sport??? (Score:4, Informative)
Commercially available automatic gearing degrades performance with 25% (for an average driver, much more for a good one). There is no reason a professional drivers would volunteer to waste that much performance just so they can rest one foot while driving. The automatics have only reentered professional racing due to new more complex engine and gear types, that are harder for a human but easier for a computer to control.
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On the other side the german economy has the biggest growth in europe with over 2%, looks we do get something right.
I would argue that copying the "American school" of economics and printing money to stimulate growth isn't really growth at all. It's like the Americans rejoicing that their exports are up. Well yeah, their dollar is worth next to nothing, of course buying American is getting cheaper for the rest of the world. Just wait till Joe Sixpack wants to buy his Made in China, wel
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I prefer Notgeld [wikipedia.org] (which was created in the aftermath of WWI hyperinflation). I collect international currency, and notgeld is some of the most artistic stuff out there [germannotgeld.com].
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"On the other side the german economy has the biggest growth in europe with over 2%, looks we do get something right.
I would argue that copying the "American school" of economics and printing money to stimulate growth isn't really growth at all."
You know that Germans are within the eurozone so they don't print their money at all, do you?
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"Quick, somebody should... Wait, german citizens already go to university for free..."
And no speed limit on their autobahn, so why would they want a simulator?
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Not the first (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Marks wing seems to work better for flying though.
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Get rFactor and head to http://rfactorcentral.com/ [rfactorcentral.com] and download one of the many available F1 mods.
response time? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Yep (Score:2)
It's all about vectors, not positions. The sim. looked fine to me.
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Do you even know what vectors are?
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Maybe Clarence didn't have clearance to find out what's his vector, victor?
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I guess you never studied physics? Acceleration, speed (more correctly, velocity) and position are all different concepts. Velocity is the rate of change of position. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. You can be accelerating and have zero velocity, for example. Eg, throw a ball into the air, and it is continually accelerating under gravity at 9.8 m/sec. But if you throw it straig
Back in the early 90's (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It never went anywhere because they couldn't figure out a way to get the throughput that the park operators where looking for.
Someone needs to go on the Mars simulator ride at Epcot... it's *precisely* this technology. Pretty cool, too.
Brett.
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Awesome concept (Score:2, Funny)
ah the memories! (Score:1, Informative)
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)
My experience with Racer.... (Score:2)
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The available source code is 2 years old; the linux and mac versions are too. The linux version segfaults on finding my joystick.
Any good car racing sims that work with linux?
Racing sims that work with linux (Score:1)
>Any good car racing sims that work with linux?
Don't know how good they are, but there are TORCS http://torcs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] and its fork Speed Dreams http://www.speed-dreams.org/ [speed-dreams.org]
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A couple things I noticed (Score:2)
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.
Nothing new - Back in the Amiga days (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:Nothing new - Back in the Amiga days (Score:5, Informative)
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I remember playing that game ages ago. The manual said that it was what Damon Hill used to prepare for all his races. Back when I was that young I used to believe it: it was so realistic to me...
Now I'm not so sure. On a side note, when you registered the game, they sent you what they said were Damon Hill's set ups for all the courses, but when we tried them out they were actually rubbish! I still have a concern that I just completely missed the point of how to drive that game, and that the set ups were act
Open Source? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
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simulator usefulness is artificial (Score:5, Informative)
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 [formula1.com] 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.
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I've often thought that the stupid rules imposed by the FIA contributed to deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenburger. It's sad to see that 16 years later they are still making senseless rulings.
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Its not senseless, its an effort to reduce annual F1 budgets by $100 million per year per team.
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No one has died in F1 since Senna. I think their rules changes have probably helped.
It's the data that's crucial, not the software (Score:2, Insightful)
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,
New Canadian Company (Score:2)