Olivier Alloyer, Salvador Bayarri, James Cremer,
Joseph Kearney, Olivier Munier, Pete Willemsen
Computer Science Department
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, U.S.A.
Interest in real-time, immersive driving simulators is burgeoning due to growing concern about road congestion and traffic safety. Interactive driving simulation is proving to be a valuable tool for investigating the causes of crashes, testing new vehicle instrumentation, prototyping novel designs for automated highways, and assessing the influence of disease, drugs, and disabilities on driving performance [8,1,3,5]. Advances in computing, image generation, and display technology have dramatically reduced equipment costs. However, the unavailability of open, inexpensive software for driving simulation is a major impediment to growth of the industry.
Driving simulation software is large, complex, and multi-faceted. An intimidating range of problems must be addressed: scene database creation, terrain modeling, vehicle dynamics, driver feedback, management of multiple real-time processes, database management for road networks and scenario state information, behavior modeling, and scenario control. Real-time execution is of paramount importance and places stringent requirements on the nature of solutions that will work. In order to advance the state of the art in driving simulation it is imperative to encourage research in the relevant sub-areas. Unfortunately, the high cost of simulator software and propriety barriers built into simulator code are inhibiting research progress. Labs are forced to either spend enormous resources building software tangential to their research focus or work in isolation without the ability to test or demonstrate their results in real systems.
With support and collaboration from Ford Motor Company, IRISA, the University of Rennes, the University of Valencia, and Renault Research, we are developing a public, open software system for driving simulation. Our goal is to promote wider involvement of researchers, encourage collaboration, and facilitate sharing of data and code. In this short paper, we give a brief overview of our software system, Hank.
Figure 1: An image captured from the Hank simulator.