Reducing Discomfort in Driving Simulators: Motion Cueing for Motion Sickness Mitigation

Driving simulators are increasingly used in research and development. However, simulators often cause motion sickness due to downscaled motion and unscaled veridical visuals. In this paper, a motion cueing algorithm is proposed that reduces motion sickness as predicted by the subjective vertical conflict (SVC) model using model predictive control (MPC). Both sensory conflict and specific force errors are penalised in the cost function, allowing the algorithm to jointly optimise fidelity and comfort. Human-in-the-loop experiments were conducted to compare four simulator motion settings: two variations of our MPC-based algorithm, one focused on pure specific force tracking and the second compromising specific force tracking and motion sickness minimisation, as well as reference adaptive washout and no motion cases. The experiments were performed on a hexapod driving simulator with participants exposed to passive driving. Experimental motion sickness results closely matched the sickness model predictions. As predicted by the model, the no motion condition yielded the lowest sickness levels. However, it was rated lowest in terms of fidelity. The compromise solution reduced sickness by over 50% (average MISC level 3 to 1.5) compared to adaptive washout and the algorithm focusing on specific force tracking, without any significant reduction in fidelity rating. The proposed approach for developing MCA that takes into account both the simulator dynamics and time evolution of motion sickness offers a significant advancement in achieving an optimal control of motion sickness and specific force recreation in driving simulators, supporting broader simulator use.

Computationally-efficient Motion Cueing Algorithm via Model Predictive Control

Driving simulators have been used in the automotive industry for many years because of their ability to perform tests in a safe, reproducible and controlled immersive virtual environment. The improved performance of the simulator and its ability to recreate in-vehicle experience for the user is established through motion cueing algorithms (MCA). Such algorithms have constantly been developed with model predictive control (MPC) acting as the main control technique. Currently, available MPC-based methods either compute the optimal controller online or derive an explicit control law offline. These approaches limit the applicability of the MCA for real-time applications due to online computational costs and/or offline memory storage issues. This research presents a solution to deal with issues of offline and online solving through a hybrid approach. For this, an explicit MPC is used to generate a look-up table to provide an initial guess as a warm-start for the implicit MPC-based MCA. From the simulations, it is observed that the presented hybrid approach is able to reduce online computation load by shifting it offline using the explicit controller. Further, the algorithm demonstrates a good tracking performance with a significant reduction of computation time in a complex driving scenario using an emulator environment of a driving simulator.