Search Results

This paper presents an overview of work performed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) Vehicle Research and Test Center (VRTC) to test, validate, and improve the planned National Advanced Driving Simulator's (NADS) vehicle dynamics simulation. This vehicle dynamics simulation, called NADSdyna, was developed by the University of Iowa's Center for Computer-Aided Design (CCAD) NADSdyna is based upon CCAD's general purpose, real-time, multi-body dynamics software, referred to as the Real-Time Recursive Dynamics (RTRD), supplemented by vehicle dynamics specific submodules VRTC has “beta tested” NADSdyna, making certain that the software both works as computer code and that it correctly models vehicle dynamics. This paper gives an overview of VRTC's beta test work with NADSdyna. The paper explains the methodology used by VRTC to validate NADSdyna.

To determine if situations and/or conditions exist in which ABS-equipped vehicles do not perform as well as those without ABS, the braking performance of nine passenger vehicles was observed over a comprehensive array of driving conditions. For most maneuvers, on most surfaces, ABS-assisted stops yielded distances shorter than those made with the ABS disabled. The one exception was on loose gravel where stopping distances increased by an average of 27.2 percent overall. Additionally, the vehicular stability observed during testing was almost always superior with ABS. For the cases in which instability was observed, ABS was not deemed responsible for its occurrence.