Motorsport car simulator integration and development

The purpose of this thesis is to integrate an external vehicle model of an electric race car on the Dynamic Simulator for performing the driver-in-loop simulations. The simulator is made by VI-Grade and works on software suite provided by them. The focus is to have an integration of this model to the simulator to further facilitate the set-up and controls tuning for the car on the dynamic simulator. The external vehicle model is a proprietary of Canopy Simulations. It is supplied in the form of a Simulink s-function (black box) with some parameters for running the model. There are several input parameters and signals which can be applied to the vehicle model. Outputs from the model can be used as inputs for the dynamic simulator. With a vehicle model not developed in VI-Grade environment, the solution is far from plug-and-play. For a better understanding of the vehicle model and the vehicle, offline simulations for some standard manoeuvres were performed. The results served as a critical part of the study to understand the car and for the integration. A simulation environment was created from scratch using the Concurrent Real-time PC and an external PC communicating with each other using a User Datagram Protocol. Integration of this external vehicle model and creating the simulation environment included: creating a simple user interaction interface for launching the simulation, setting up the inputs to the model from the driver cockpit, racetrack inputs, setting up the outputs from the model to serve for driver perception, and telemetry. Once the preliminary integration was performed, an integration for advanced control systems was done. Different driver-in-loop sessions were also run for testing of the integration. The final goal of this thesis was to run this integrated simulation environment and use it as a base for the set-up and control systems tuning of the race car on the dynamic simulator.