A Survey of Driving Research Simulators Around the World.

Abstract

The literature review is part of the EPSRC funded project "Driver performance in the EPSRC driving simulator: a validation study". The aim of the project is to validate this simulator, located at the Department of Psychology, University of Leeds, and thereby to indicate the strengths and weaknesses of the existing configuration. It will provide guidance on how the simulator can be modified and overcome any deficiencies that are detected and also provide "benchmarks" against which other simulators can be compared. The literature review will describe the technical characteristics of the most well-known driving simulators around the world, their special features and their application areas until today. The simulators will be described and compared according to their cost (low, medium and high) and also contact addresses and photographs of the simulators will be provided by the end of the paper. In the process of gathering this information, it became apparent that there are mainly two types of papers published - either in journals or in proceedings from conferences: those describing only the technical characteristics of a specific simulator and those referring only to the applications of a specific simulator. For the first type of papers, the level of detail, format and content varies significantly where for the second one it has been proven extremely difficult to find any information about the technical characteristics of the simulator where the study had been carried out. A number of details provided in this paper are part of personal communication, or personal visits to those particular driving simulator centres or from the World Wide Web. It should also be noted here that most of the researchers contacted here offered very detail technical characteristics and application areas of their driving simulators and the author is grateful to them