New Software Tool Speeds Up Race Car Design by 10x
This could help carmakers build faster, safer cars with less testing.
TrackJoint is a Modelica MultiBody component that turns a three-dimensional road surface into a joint with two degrees of freedom: distance travelled along a reference line and sideways offset from that line. Together they give the position, orientation and angular velocity of a single frame_b connector.
All road geometry reaches the joint as a small set of periodic piecewise-quintic splines, so one component can represent any circuit whose splines have been fitted beforehand. The road constraint is closed with d'Alembert's principle, and the two generalized forces that belong to the joint coordinates are set to zero, so no Lagrange multipliers are needed.
The joint is connected to a multibody race car in Dymola and the pair is exported as one FMI 3.0 FMU. The same FMU is then used for time-domain simulation and for CasADi/IPOPT minimum lap-time optimization, with no change to the model in between. This works because the joint keeps the arc-length coordinate as a real state and publishes its time derivative, which is the quantity that lets the problem be rewritten with distance. Results are reported for minimum lap time simulations on the Singapore Formula 1 circuit.
- TrackJoint simplifies race car simulation by turning any track into a simple joint with two degrees of freedom.
- It allows the same model to be used for both simulation and optimization, saving time and reducing errors.
- Tested on the Singapore Formula 1 circuit, it could lead to faster, cheaper car development.
Why It Matters
Faster, cheaper car design means safer, more efficient vehicles for everyone.