Assetto Corsa Driver-In-The-Loop Simulator
With harsh Ottawa winters it is difficult to get meaninful testing time for drivers before the Michigan competition in May. Additionally, drivers first time driving the car will only be after it is manufactured. This provides a way to get the driver famililar with the platform before manufacturing and provides more practice time.
The problem
Driver-in-the-loop simulation software can be expensive, but is very beneficial to a racing driver and team in this day in age. Not only does it help the driver get aqainted with the car, it allows them to give input on handling before driving. This can be valuable to the engineering team to make design adjustments to try and meet the drivers requests with the purpose of reducing laptime.
What I built
Assetto Corsa was picked as the software to use due to it's popularity and low price while still providing enough physics input to make a model that should be able to reflect the handling and acceleration of a Formula Student vehicle. Initially, data was taken from the CAD model of the car to determine the suspension pick-up points, wheelbase, and track width. The Formula SAE Tire Test Consotium was as used as the baseline for the tire data.
Result
While still continuously evolving the simulator model of the car gives laptimes within 2% of tested on track laptimes and has similar characteristics, this can be seen through comparing accelerations, oversteer, steering input, etc. In the future this should move to a Matlab/Simulink model to give our team more control over the behind the scenes calculations to tailor them more to our liking and to increase the fidelity in our model as we gain a better unstanding. Using Assetto Corsa, while readily available requires trial and error due to the models, especially tire models.