Search Results

The perception of visual information is the major input requirement for the psychological cognition process. The quality of perception of visual information is impaired by the geometrical and optical conditions of the displayed information. This concerns all technical information of the car as instruments, optical indicators, telltales and control displays. The international widely-used 3D-Man-Model System RAMSIS receives some additional functionality for analysis and practical design to simulate these viewing conditions in the car. These new RAMSIS functions include methods for the analysis of sight shadows, limits of visibility of liquid crystal displays, the time of focus shifts of the driver and the modelling of the optical parameters of head-up displays. These capabilities will enable a RAMSIS user to allow for (degraded) visual performance when designing the rising number of user interface displays in cars and airplanes.

This paper presents the usage of the Digital Human Models (DHM) PCMAN and RAMSIS to determine parameters for a supported ingress and egress on a mock-up. Sports cars with lower seating positions show occurring difficulties among older drivers during ingress/egress. To equip sports cars with higher seats or narrow door sills seems limited due to design aspects. Therefore the idea of an ingress/egress support system arose. To build a mock-up, it needs specific dimensions already in the CAD design phase. Here DHM-systems are utilized. As no similar systems are known, no ballpark figures for trajectories of the seat or movement ranges can be derived from literature. Therefore pre-tests were done with a simple manually moved seat. Test persons showed high acceptance and discomfort reduction. In order to design a proper testing environment for repeatable and reliable results, a variable seat with electric motors is built into a mock-up with a package of a sports car.

During early phases of interior car layout a lot of different aspects have to be considered like crashworthiness, regulations, philosophy of the company etc.. Ergonomic aspects do not always play the most important role in these cases. Since aspects of comfort in cars are getting more and more important in nowadays these aspects should be taken into account very early in the interior car layout process. This paper shows a way to design the interior layout of a car from scratch for a good postural comfort for all anthropometries with the aid of a digital human model (RAMSIS). The novelty of this approach is to use the digital human model to design the interior and not to verify or correct an existing one.

Some systems like the ESP already exist to support the driver for the stabilization of the vehicle. But the next generation of active safety system will have to deal with a wider environment of the vehicle, to go closer to the limit of the vehicle dynamic etc. With such a complexity the systems will also have to take into account their own limits and to reduce their actions when they have a low confidence, e.g. when sensors are degraded. This article describes firstly a virtual driver and secondly a decision control that fuses their command depending on their confidences in order to improve the reliability of the command level.

This paper introduces a concept of predictive active safety by means of a full redundant architecture with the driver, from the perception of the environment to the vehicle controllers. The bottleneck of the current driver-vehicle association will be analyzed first. Then a virtual driver and the safety envelope of the different maneuvers will be described. A decision control will be presented that it matches the driver's command in this safety envelope. It is designed to give adequate feedback to the driver and can safely perform the command to the optimum of the chosen maneuver.

Cutting development times in car manufacturing means bringing forward the knowledge processes. Simulations based directly on CAD data reduce or replace time-consuming hardware loops significantly and therefore make a significant contribution to this. Ergonomic product design is an area that is challenged as far as the further development of virtual methods is concerned. Simulation of the static and quasi-static positions of passengers inside the car is the current state of the art in ergonomic product design. For this reason, interest is strongly focused on the simulation of complex movement processes within the context of enhancing simulation tools. For the car manufacturer, the manner in which people enter and leave the car is of particular interest. Getting into the car is the customers' first actual contact with it. It may also develop into a serious problem for car drivers, as they get older.

When investigating the posture comfort in vehicles two important influencing factors can be distinguished: In order to evaluate these influences a combined laboratory-field-experiment was carried out. A real car was equipped with cameras to record the body posture and the joint angles. The static forces exerted by the driver on his contact points were recorded in a corresponding mock-up. The forces to maintain the body posture were calculated. The following results were found:

The ergonomic design of automobiles has changed over in the last years. It is increasingly being transferred from the usage of two-dimensional templates of the human shape to computer-aided manmodels. So far these models were mainly used for static anthropometric investigations on the drivers workplace. Dynamic questions can be answered only very insufficiently. In the context of this work a methodology was developed to precalculate target directed human movements in a motor vehicle environment with the CAD-manmodel RAMSIS. A new two-piece model was developed. In this model dynamic boundary conditions, so called dynamic restrictions, for any movement in a car are determined, concerning outside parameters. In the following, the entire bodyposture is determined by a statistical posture probability model, considering these dynamic restrictions. A control theory of human movements was derived from the field of neurophysiology.