Virtual Truck Driver Training and Validation: Preliminary Results for Range and Skid Pad

This poster presentation describes preliminary work done at the Carnegie Mellon Driver Training and Safety Institute to test the validity of truck driver simulator training for backing maneuvers, and the digitalization of a skid pad. Preliminary results supported the validity of simulator training for straight-line and reverse-lane-change backing skills. Results for the skid pad work indicated that stopping distances during hard braking on the virtual skid pad were somewhat shorter than on the physical skid pad at the same initial speed. The shorter stopping distance in the simulator was the result of the functional limit of 0.2 surface coefficient of friction in the simulation dynamic model. A virtual skid pad with a slope of 9% was created to test the effect of slope on braking distance. Results showed that stopping distances in the simulator increased as a result of increasing the slope, indicating that the functional limit of the dynamic model can be overcome by varying the virtual slope.