🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <YAMAUCHI.91Jan15180754@heron.cs.rochester.edu> yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) writes:
>
>As part of my thesis research in behavior-based robotics, I'm going to
>be building a simulated robot control system for freeway driving, and
>I'd like to include reasonable assumptions about automobile dynamics
>in the simulator.
[info wish list deleted]

If you really only want to make some guesses about maximum
accelerations, velocities, and such, buy a few issues of
Road and Track magazine.   When they review a car, they
give you these sorts of specs, including torque and hp
curves, from which you can derive some of what you need.
Most useful to you might be velocity curves of the 0-x mph
runs.  

*However*, I think you're totally at sea if you expect to
learn anything from this kind of simulation.  How will you
model changing grip due to tread deformation, road surface,
tire pressure, sidewall windup, suspension geometry, tire
temperature, tire compound, road material, slip rate and
angle, etc.?  And this is only the tip of the iceberg when
it comes to analyzing automobile handling.

You could argue that some of these effects on the
trajectory of your modeled vehicle are negligible, but if you
want to know about the extremes of adhesion in turns,
acceleration, and braking, then I won't believe your
arguments.   

If you want to use a behavior-based system (or any other,
really) to control a vehicle with nontrivial dynamics, my
suggestion is to build a (real) vehicle that can travel at
sufficient (scale) speed.

--Jim Jennings
--Cornell Computer Science Robotics Lab