Desdemona, an alternative moving base design for driving simulation

Desdemona is a moving-base research-simulator that was designed with a special focus on spatial disorientation demonstrations, flight simulation, and driving simulation. The cabin is equipped with a car mock-up that contains force-feedback on pedals and steering wheel, and out-the-window visuals. The cabin is mounted in a fully gimbaled system that, as a whole, can move vertically and horizontally. To enable sustained accelerations, the system can centrifuge around a central-yaw axis while the cabin is somewhere at an eccentric position on the horizontal track. The six degrees-of-freedom result in a large cylindrical motion space with a wide dynamic range relative to conventional hexapod design. The design offers new possibilities with respect to motion cueing and human motion perception, in particular for driving simulation, e.g., the possibility to cue sustained-sway acceleration when driving a curve by centrifugation around the central axis. This paper describes the Desdemona simulator in a car driving application. The different components required for car driving are discussed and an example of recorded real-world vehicle data is given. This curve-driving data has been used to demonstrate basic motion filter design principles for driving simulation in Desdemona.