ORLANDO, Florida, December 3, 2013 — CM Labs recently participated in a study led by the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, which demonstrated that students trained in driving simulators obtained the same skills in the same time as students trained in actual vehicles.

The study also revealed that commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software is in all likelihood the most suitable option in terms of maintaining a reasonable training budget. Today, some of the best-performing systems are available off the shelf for motion system manufacturers, and can be adapted to basically any simulation and training needs at more affordable prices than ever before.

These are all key factors in a decision process that will allow many pilots, operators, and drivers to train, while at the same time providing quicker return on investment (ROI) to the simulator owners. COTS products also provide on-demand availability of the complete system as well as replacement parts as needed.

(Source: Study: Driving Sims Are Surprisingly Effective by Lauren Biron)

In light of these results, and based on 15 years of high-fidelity ground vehicle simulation expertise, CM Labs has invited select technology partners to lead another experiment. The goal this time was to create—in a short period of time—a driving simulator solution prototype with minimal integration costs.

To build the prototype, CM Labs worked with some of its core technology partners and leveraged the expertise of standards-driven leaders of the modeling and simulation community.

In order to solve the challenge of next-generation heavy equipment, earth-moving, and military vehicle simulators, the best approach is to match a highly advanced dynamics simulation engine that can generate true-to-life movements associated with an accurate visualization solution, along with complex, realistic training scenarios, and a precise and practical motion platform that can render the most reliable kinesthetic cues to the trainee.

With perfect integration, this leads to the ultimate training tool, capable of keeping up with the high expectations of next-generation trainees, and providing simplicity of deployment, operation, and adaptation to future training needs. The next few years are going to redefine training as a safer, more efficient, more scalable, and more realistic approach for our troops.

1| GROUND VEHICLE SIMULATION

CM Labs’ Vortex solution provides highly accurate models of interactions between different surfaces and object types (including collisions between vehicles and obstacles, the impact of various loads on cables/equipment, tire-terrain interactions, and dynamic terrain).

This allows heavy equipment/vehicle simulation solutions to provide accurate predictions of vehicle behavior (e.g., skidding, fish-tailings, tip-overs, equipment malfunctions, and hydraulics system performance) and performance over varying terrain in multiple weather conditions, which translates into learned trainee reactions and responses to real-world events.

Speed the delivery of your solutions by integrating ready-to- use simulation software from CM Labs—and reduce the risk of software rework, unexpected development costs, and project delays.

Vortex has been validated and field-tested over and over again by industry leaders who can all attest to the fact that Vortex is robust, highly re-useable technology that works the way you need it to. Vortex can integrate with any level of your infrastructure, depending on your needs, resources, and levels of expertise.

2| SIMULATION SCENARIO CREATION

Leveraging a computer generated forces (CGF) application as powerful as STAGE allows you to add context to your ground vehicle simulations by building complex tactical and operational scenarios with more than 1,000 simultaneous intelligent entities—which means your operator training solution is not just high-fidelity: it’s true to life.

 
Creating simulation scenarios that correspond to realistic behaviors is a key challenge for simulation developers.

Presagis STAGE provides a flexible and integrated simulation environment to build and execute complex simulation scenarios for operations, training, and analysis. Drawing on more than 15 years of Presagis global leadership and pioneering expertise in the modeling and simulation industry, STAGE enables programmers and non-programmers alike to work in a flexible simulation development environment to build and simulate dynamic virtual environments that include a wide array of models and intelligent characters—with full control of all aspects of the simulation.

Presagis promotes reusability and use of industry standards with STAGE, as well as with all its COTS products. STAGE can seamlessly interoperate in a distributed simulation environment and benefits from HLA and DIS protocol (HLA 1516, HLA 1.3, and DIS protocols) support out-of-the-box. In addition, STAGE also leverages standards CIGI, shared memory, and TCP/IP.

3 | HUMAN CHARACTER BEHAVIOR

Creating a strong pattern of life cultural environment with local behaviors and interactions with the ownship simulated in this training solution allows you to train operators for military operations on urban terrain (MOUT), urban convoy scenarios, and crowd navigation analysis.  The realism of cultural behaviors and animations generated by DI-Guy offers the ideal solution to prompt adoption by trainees.  In our experimental context, DI-Guy characters are published across the network from a DI-Guy Life Form Server using DI-Guy Scenario with artificial intelligence (AI) and via STAGE with DI-Guys as the native STAGE Human Character solution.

DI-Guy is the leading developer of software tools for real-time human visualization, simulation and artificial intelligence. Every DI-Guy software offering comes with thousands of ready-to-use characters, appearances and motions. DI-Guy enables the easy creation of crowds and individuals who are terrain-aware, autonomous and react intelligently to ongoing events.

As well as being the de facto global human character solution in the traditional training arena, DI-Guy is used in a wide range of synthetic environments on a broad spectrum of visualization platforms—pedestrian avoidance system development, urban visualization, architectural walk-throughs, airside training, robotics and off-world conceptual visualization, for example.

4| IMMERSIVE VISUALIZATION

Vega Prime brings sophisticated visual simulations to life, providing a robust solution for challenging motion modeling and interactive applications.

Today’s simulation applications need to be delivered at optimal performance levels in order to achieve positive training results.

Presagis Vega Prime is a complete 3D visualization software development toolkit for the creation and deployment of accurate and visually rich simulation applications. Its extendable and scalable architecture enables users to tailor their application according to the complexity of their requirements,  and achieve high-density scenes over wide geographic areas in real time. Native support for CIGI, DIS, and all flavors of HLA ensures connectivity to other standards-based systems.

What’s more, integration of Vortex with Presagis Vega Prime enables developers to easily create Vortex vehicles and objects directly within Vega Prime’s flexible application development environment—often without coding. This powerful software solution enables users to straightforwardly model complex ground vehicles, and simulate real-time vehicle dynamics.

5 | KINESTETIC HARDWARE | STIMULATE MUSCLE MEMORY

For kinesthetic cues to feel accurate to trainees, the solution’s motion systems must be precise and reliable—and they must be as rapid as possible in order to translate into the motion and vibration cued by the simulation engine’s physics.

Reaction time must also be kept at a minimum to avoid potential motion sickness effects. Along with sheer speed, information also needs to maintain a very low distortion level with respect to reality, so as to avoid negative training.

VRX integrated the best actuators from D-BOX in an original and scalable solution that can be configured and deployed quickly to match any simulation requirements.

Source: cm-labs.com

Learn more about:

·         CM Labs

·         Presagis

·         VRX

·         DI-Guy

·         D-BOX

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