VI-grade’s Vision Is Virtual Development

VI-grade has ideas about the future of product development that some might call radical. The Darmstadt, Germany, simulation company, like other computer-aided engineering (CAE) organizations, wants product development to go faster. But what sets the company apart is that the big chunk of time it hopes to reduce from the product design and development process is the physical prototyping needed to assess the driving experience.

VI-grade 2022.1 upgrades help engineers to better envision the driving environment. (Image courtesy of VI-grade.)

VI-grade believes it can help its “customers to go directly from a concept to trying out that conceived product virtually, before hardware is built.” The company was founded in 2005 and its latest user conference drew two thousand attendees from across the world. Each one of its customers use physical driving simulators and software from the VI-grade product line to make better decisions based on simulation.

The company recently announced the 2022.1 update for several of its largest software offerings, including VI-CarRealTime, VI-WorldSim, VI-DriveSim and a full spectrum of NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) tools. This new release adds features, enhances existing features and makes progress toward the full integration of third-party simulation software with the VI-grade family of tools. User enhancements and a strong commitment to its software partners should help the company push toward that zero-build development future.

For a better look at VI-grade’s physical simulators, read more on engineering.com at: VI-grade’s New COMPACT NVH Simulator Brings the Full NVH Experience into the Office or VI-grade Announces DiM50, a Hexapod-Only Driving Simulator.

VI-CarRealTime Gets the Big Feature Additions

One of the biggest products in the VI-grade family is VI-CarRealTime, and the software gets the biggest boost in this release. The new features include a Yaw Moment Event that gives insight into a system’s dynamic equilibrium at constant speed. This helps engineers to understand steering at different slip conditions and different curvatures. Changes were also made to the Solid Axle suspension model. It now treats the axle as a separate body and focuses on the axle stresses and reactions as a distinct system. This should increase the accuracy of steering dynamics computations.

VI-CarRealTime provides a real-time dashboard of driving variables. (Image courtesy of VI-grade.)

On the administrative side of things, the Steering Subsystems Editor was redesigned to give users more control over specific elements, and the Adams Car Interface can now support multiple versions of VI-CarRealTime with a single version of Adams Car. This bump for engineers who are using VI-grade and Adams software together is indicative of the company’s commitment to using its tools with other vendors’ products.

For more on VI-grade’s software compatibility, read: Why VI-grade Opened Its Driving Simulation Technology to Modelica.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Simulators Get Upgrades Too

VI-WorldSim is the software offering that helps Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) engineers simulate vehicle environments, and the 2022.1 release sees some feature enhancements. The big boost is in the sky, where clouds are now volumetric and the visualization of light is redesigned, especially for nighttime conditions. AI-controlled vehicles can swerve around obstacles now, and users can flag one vehicle out of a multi-vehicle simulation to have specific behavior settings. The integration between VI-WorldSim and Simulink is strengthened through the expansion of the Simulink Library of AI parameters.

VI-WorldSim adds enhanced environment models and their effects on a driver. (Image courtesy of VI-grade.)

VI-DriveSim has a redesigned interface for customers who work with physical driving simulators. Even though the company’s vision is an engineering future without prototypes, the physical driving simulators themselves are a huge tangible component of the development process. There is a colossal amount of coordination and IT work that goes into communicating the state of each subsystem as the driver operates a simulator, and this redesign helps users to control more of that communication.

Improvements to NVH Simulator

The release also comes packaged with a new NVH simulator toolbox, which includes:

Magic Brush sound editing multi-tool
Wav edit with trim, fade and invert functionality
Order Designer to incorporate an electric vehicle (EV)
Road/engine masking playback

The NVH simulator data preparation software also sees improvements like high-res order displays, auto order identification, integrated masking noise calculations and batch processing.

“I’m overjoyed to share this significant software update for VI-flagship grade’s software product line,” said Roberto De Vecchi, VI-grade product development manager. “All of our real-time and NVH software solutions have undergone a significant overhaul with version 2022.1, and I am convinced that customers of our offline and driving simulator software will benefit much from it.”

What Does It All Mean?

This is a significant slate of changes to some of VI-grade’s most popular simulation offerings. There are great enhancements and still more in the NVH suite of tools. Most prior years have seen multiple software revisions (2021 had three different releases, for instance), so it’s a little odd that the first 2022 enhancements are releasing in August. But VI-grade makes up for this as there is a lot involved with this version of the software.

VI-grade sets itself apart from other simulation companies due to its strong push toward not building any physical prototypes, to assess the driving experience, by utilizing physical simulators. The physical things that need to be built, then, become simulators for drivers to use and computing hardware resources. This seems radical, especially in the automotive industry, where prototyping has been reduced over the last few decades but is still a huge part of the design and development process from a driver’s perspective.

A shift to no prototypes feels huge, but as a society we are in the midst of several of these shifts. Moving to completely renewable energy, EVs and autonomous vehicles all seems like futuristic movie concepts until we realize that the change is already happening incrementally. These types of changes need to be carefully managed and our commitment as engineers to “hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public,” as the National Society of Professional Engineers would say, has never been more important.