The Illinois Roadway Simulator-a hardware-in-the-loop testbed for vehicle dynamics and control

The Illinois Roadway Simulator (IRS) is a novel, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) scale vehicle testbed used to study vehicle dynamics and controls. An overview of this system is presented, and individual hardware issues are addressed. System modeling results on the vehicles and hardware are introduced, and comparisons of the resulting dynamics are made with full sized vehicles. To address the realism factor of using scaled vehicles, comparisons are made between vehicle responses of full and 1:10 scale vehicles. Finally, the IRS is used to examine the effect of actuator dynamics on a particular vehicle control application