Developing an Unreal Engine 4-Based Vehicle Driving Simulator Applicable in Driver Behavior Analysis—A Technical Perspective

Vehicle safety remains a topic of major interest, and diverse assistance systems are implemented that focus primarily on analyzing the immediate vicinity of the car and the driver’s control inputs. In this paper, by contrast, we emphasize understanding the driver’s control performance via obtaining valuable data and relevant characteristics. To acquire the data, we employed an in-house-designed, laboratory-built vehicle driving simulator. This simulator exploits the Unreal Engine 4 framework to deliver a high level of realism. The fact that the actual designing and associated processes were materialized through our own efforts has brought advantages such as simplified data acquisition, possibility of creating custom scenarios, and modification of the virtual elements according to our specific needs. We also developed an application to analyze the measured data from the perspective of control theory, establishing a set of parameters that provided the basis for an early version of a driver performance index indicator.

Design of Data Acquisition System for Vehicle Driving Simulator

Data acquisition systems have a direct impact on interactivity and authenticity to the car driving simulator. According to the requirements of the vehicle driving simulator to complete the multi-channel data acquisition and processing with high speed and high precision, a set of real-time data acquisition system was designed. The system uses STM32F103ZET6 chip to process data acquisition, and communicates with the host computer through serial port. The experimental results show that the designed data acquisition system has good real-time performance, high accuracy and meets the expected functional requirements.