What kind of research can be conducted with TRACSLab?
Research possibilities are very diverse, ranging from route choice studies that include road pricing and travel time reliability, to responses to traffic management and travel information. Research on interactions between drivers and other road users can also be studied by using several simulators in the same environment. For more information on our current projects click here.
What hardware is being used?
There are 10 identical car simulators using converted Holden Commodores. Five are located at The University of Sydney and five at The University of New South Wales (UNSW). There is also a bicycle simulator located at UNSW. The simulators are manufactured by Realtime Technologies (USA) and can be used individually, together with the simulators in the same location or all the simulators across both locations.
The cars are fully functional including transmission (automatic with netural, park and reverse), accelerator and brake pedals, speedometer, tachometer, direction indicators and the radio! The bicycle simulator is a real bicycle mounted on a specially designed platform to allow for pedalling, braking and steering.
What software is being used?
The driving scenarios are created using SimVista as VRML files. The 3D environments can be created using any program that creates VRML files (including SimVista) or, for more detailed 3D environments in OpenFlight (.flt) format. Simcreator is being used to run the simulations and record the data. Ambient traffic can be generated by Simcreator, AIMSUN or VISSIM as desired.
The saved data can include any number of variables relating to the 3D environment (such as the position of the vehicle) and vehicle sensors such as the speed, acceleration and steering wheel position among many others. By default observations are recorded 420 times per second.