Mechanical Simulation Releases CarSim, TruckSim, and BikeSim 2018.1

ANN ARBOR, Mich., June 26, 2018 - Mechanical Simulation is pleased to announce the release of the 2018.1 versions of the vehicle dynamics simulation tools CarSim, TruckSim, and BikeSim.

In a departure from past versions, this major release comes just six months after the previous major release in December 2017.

According to Dr. Michael Sayers, CEO and Chief Technology Officer, “Our past practice was to provide a major software upgrade about once per year, and at the half-way point incorporate minor updates for bug fixes or features that weren’t quite ready for the full release. In earlier days, our products were used mainly to study vehicle dynamic behavior, and many of the improvements involved the math model of the vehicle behavior.”

Times have changed, as have the priorities for simulation. With the increasing use of the advanced controllers for ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and autonomous driving, simulation is increasingly used to validate the controllers in progressively more complicated scenarios. Simulations must include more vehicles, operating under more conditions, and including more interactions with pedestrians and other vehicles. In past applications, a vehicle might be simulated a few thousand times to characterize dynamic behavior, replicating tests done in closed proving grounds. Sayers notes “simulated conditions have expanded to include running with the many built-in controllers in hundreds of thousands or even millions of simulations to cover situations in which the controllers must always perform safely.”

In addition to vehicle math models and visualization tools, the simulation tools need to include multiple 3D road surfaces, other vehicles, and possibly pedestrians and/or animals. The software packages have been extended to fill these needs, with many new animation resources (walking pedestrians, pedaling bicyclists, running animals), road surfaces and paint markings, road signs, and other “props” that appear along a road. A tool called VS Scene Builder was introduced in the previous 2018.0 versions to build scenes with drag-and-drop to locate paths and objects. A web-based tool called Atlas was introduced a few years ago to download GPS data from mapping services such as Google in order to simulate existing roads and intersections.

In preparing for the 2018.1 release, developers at Mechanical Simulation realized that with so many new tools, the overall improvements were fairly major. Although the new versions include many improvements in the vehicle models, improvements are perhaps more significant in the scenario-building tools and supporting resources. The new capabilities include: improvements in the Atlas tool to include GPS altitude along with latitude and longitude when downloading data; improved smoothing and editing of data when importing GPS data into CarSim, TruckSim, and BikeSim; and software improvements in VS Scene Builder (UnDo/Redo, dragging and dropping animator assets into the scene, access to global X-Y coordinates in scene).

Although the most visible changes involve roads and scenery, the math models were also upgraded in many ways: connections to external software such as Simulink now support a “preview” option that eliminates lag between connected models; management of multiple roads and paths was improved to reuse datasets more easily; built-in sensors and moving objects have new features that simplify the simulation of traffic vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic signals.

With the expanding role for simulation in an ADAS development process operating at an ever-accelerating pace, Sayers predicts that Mechanical Simulation will continue the practice of making major product releases at six-month intervals to maintain its leadership in the vehicle dynamics field.

About Mechanical Simulation Corporation: Mechanical Simulation Corporation is a technology leader in the development and distribution of advanced software used to simulate vehicle performance under a wide variety of conditions. The company was established in 1996, and from its Ann Arbor, Mich., headquarters provides car, truck and motorcycle simulation packages, training and ongoing support to more than 90 OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, and over 160 universities and government research groups worldwide. For more information, please visit www.carsim.com.

The Atlas web tool is used with Import options to reproduce the 3D geometry of a highway exit in TruckSim (I-94 exit 172 in Ann Arbor).

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