Modeling Ice Friction for Vehicle Dynamics of a Bobsled with Application in Driver Evaluation and Driving Simulation
This work addresses the problem of modeling ice friction for bobsled dynamics to improve driver evaluation and simulation, which is incremental as it applies existing methods to this specific domain.
The researchers developed an ice friction model for bobsled vehicle dynamics by combining experimental and simulation data for longitudinal friction and collecting sensor data from 44 runs for lateral friction, enabling application in driving simulation and driver evaluation, where top drivers showed similar performance with different styles.
We provide an ice friction model for vehicle dynamics of a two-man bobsled which can be used for driver evaluation and in a driver-in-the-loop simulator. Longitudinal friction is modeled by combining experimental results with finite element simulations to yield a correlation between contact pressure and friction. To model lateral friction, we collect data from 44 bobsleigh runs using special sensors. Non-linear regression is used to fit a bob-specific one-track vehicle dynamics model to the data. It is applied in driving simulation and enables a novel method for bob driver evaluation. Bob drivers with various levels of experience are investigated. It shows that a similar performance of the top drivers results from different driving styles.