LAUSR

The development of new technologies like advanced driver assistance systems or automated driving requires a flexible simulation environment of sufficient complexity. In general this flexibility is not provided by commercial software packages. This paper presents a three-dimensional and nonlinear hand-made model for heavy commercial vehicles including tractor and trailer as well as tractor and semitrailer combinations that can be used in different simulation environments, as well as in real-time applications. As typical for trucks, the torsional flexibility of the frame and a suspended driver's cabin are taken into account. The design kinematics makes it possible to handle different and quite complex axle suspensions very efficiently. Appropriate force elements are used to model various couplings between tractor and trailer or tractor and semitrailer, respectively. The virtual test truck environment (VTT) coded in ANSI C is extremely portable and can easily be embedded in commercial simulation packages like MATLAB/Simulink. It includes the TMeasy tyre model and offers flexible interfaces to third-party software tools.