Shorter development times, increased standards for vehicle emissions and a greater number of vehicle variants result in a higher level of complexity in the vehicle development process. Efficient development of powertrain and driver assistance functions under comparable and reproducible operating conditions is possible on vehicle test benches. Yet, the realistic simulation of real driving environments on test benches is a challenge. Current test procedures and new technologies, such as Real Driving Emission tests and Autonomous Driving, require a reproducible and even more detailed simulation of the driving environment. Due to this, the simulation of curve driving in particular is gaining in importance. This results from its significant influence on energy consumption and Autonomous Driving functions with lateral guidance, such as lane departure and evasion assistance. Reproducibility can be additionally increased by using a driving robot. At today’s vehicle test benches, pedal and shift robots are predominantly used for longitudinal dynamic tests in the performed test procedures. In order to meet these new test automation requirements for vehicle test benches, the cooperative operation of pedal and steering robots is needed on a test bench setup suitable for this purpose. In this publication, the authors present the setup of a vehicle test bench to be used in automated and reproducible vehicle-in-the-loop tests during steering events. The focus is on the test-bench-specific setup with steerable front wheels, the actuators for simulating the wheel steering torque around the steering axle and the robots used for pedals and steering wheel. Results from various test series are presented and the potential of the novel test environment is shown. The results are reproducible in various test series due to the closed-loop operation without human driving influences at the test bench.

The increasingly stringent CO₂ emissions standards require innovative solutions in the vehicle development process. One possibility to reduce CO₂ emissions is the electrification of powertrains. The resulting increased complexity, as well as the increased competition and time pressure make the use of simulation software and test benches indispensable in the early development phases. This publication therefore presents a methodology for test bench coupling to enable early testing of electrified powertrains. For this purpose, an internal combustion engine test bench and an electric motor test bench are virtually interconnected. By applying and extending the Distributed Co-Simulation Protocol Standard for the presented hybrid electric powertrain use case, real-time-capable communication between the two test benches is achieved. Insights into the test bench setups, and the communication between the test benches and the protocol extension, especially with regard to temperature measurements, enable the extension to be applied to other powertrain or test bench configurations. The shown results from coupled test bench operations emphasize the applicability. The discussed experiences from the test bench coupling experiments complete the insights.

Full-vehicle test benches are used for the development and validation of vehicle functions or components. To obtain realistic results, the vehicle’s (sub)systems and the surrounding environment must be simulated in a suitable simulation environment on the test bench. One relevant subsystem to many studies is the chassis, which behaves differently on the test bench due to the absence of spatial accelerations. However, the relevant information for simulating the chassis is often known only to the manufacturers. To address this challenge, this publication presents a method for obtaining a reliable kinematic model of the chassis. The chassis is captured using a 3D scanner, allowing relevant hard points to be determined. Using IPGKinematics, wheel travel curves are extracted from these hard points for simulations in CarMaker. The simulation results were validated against real-world driving maneuvers performed with the vehicle under test. The comparison shows a high level of accuracy despite some simplifications in the simulation. The presented method can therefore be considered valid. To further validate the method, various potentials are discussed and possible extensions are presented.