ABSTRACT1 This paper describes a human-in-the-loop motion-based simulator which was designed, built and used to measure the duty cycle of a combat vehicle in a virtual simulation environment. The simulation environment integrates two advanced crewstations which implement both a driver’s station and a gunner’s station of a simulated future tank. The simulated systems of the tank include a series hybrid-electric propulsion system and its main weapon systems. The simulated vehicle was placed in a virtual combat scenario which was then executed by the participating Soldiers. The duty cycle as measured includes the commands of the driver and gunner as well as external factors such as terrain and enemy contact. After introducing the project, the paper describes the simulation environment which was assembled to run the experiment. It emphasizes the design of the experiment as well as the approach, challenges and issues involved. It presents the experiment results and briefly discusses on-going and future work. INTRODUCTION One of the goals of the RDECOM-TARDEC Power and Energy (P&E) program is to advance the design, development, and testing of hybrid electric power and propulsion technology for advanced combat vehicles. This is being accomplished through the integration and evaluation of power and energy technologies from various Army Technology and Objective (ATO) programs. The by-product of the TARDEC P&E program will be a compact, integrated system that will provide UNCLAS: Dist A. Approved for public release. efficient power and energy generation, and power management, suitable for spiral integration into the Future Combat System (FCS) Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV) program. To effectively develop an advanced power system for combat vehicles, accurate estimates of power loads throughout the complete range of operations are required. A comprehensive combat vehicle usage profile, or “duty cycle”, which would provide these power load estimates, does not exist at this time. The TARDEC P&E program is attempting to remedy this situation by establishing multiple combat vehicle duty cycles. These duty cycles will be derived from the virtual representations of advanced combat vehicles and combat scenarios using both warfighter-in-the-loop and power system hardware-in-the-loop simulation described in detail in the remainder of this paper. These duty cycle measurements combine engineering-level power supply systems with performance-level models of power consumption devices within a warfighter simulation of combat mission scenarios. For our purposes, a military vehicle's duty cycle is specific to the mission and platform type but is a design- and configuration-independent representation of events and circumstances which affect power consumption. Such events and circumstances encompass (1) vehicle operation such as speed, grade, turning, turret/gun activity, and gun firing plus (2) external scenario components that affect power consumption like incoming rounds, ambient temperature, and soil conditions. The event inputs can be distance-based when the vehicle is moving or time-based when the vehicle is stationary, or triggered with some other state condition. Virtual Combat Vehicle Experimentation for Duty Cycle Measurement Mark Brudnak, Mike Pozolo and AnnMarie Meldrum U.S. Army RDECOM-TARDEC Todd Mortsfield and Andrey Shvartsman DCS Corporation Wilford Smith and Jarrett Goodell SAIC, Inc. Dale Holtz Realtime Technologies, Inc. 2008-01-077 6 54 SAE Int. J. Commer. Veh. | Volume 1 | Issue 1Downloaded from SAE International by University of Leeds, Sunday, September 23, 2018To measure such a duty cycle, the TARDEC Simulation Laboratory (TSL) has been building a motion base/warfighter-in-the-loop simulation capability in which Soldiers can virtually operate their vehicles in relevant combat scenarios. This capability is then used to perform experiments in