Background:

The U.S. Army needed a hyper-realistic rollover trainer for soldiers riding in their MRAP--basically a stretched, heavy armor-clad Hummer vehicle--to train how to exit such a vehicle safely when it rolls off a mountain into a river in unfriendly desert territory.

The Army Game Studio created an extensive virtual-reality 3D video-game world of an MRAP driving around such mountains, with a realistic physics engine that in fact handles the simulated vehicle falling off cliffs into rivers if it swerves or tilts too much. They even put in IED road mines, and villagers shooting small arms at the vehicle. But this simulation is untethered, unscripted driving in six degrees-of-freedom---three translational and three rotational---an unlimited, real challenge for motion-platform ride designers.

World-leading The Scenic Route Hollywood fabrication company, builders of space capsule mockups, entertainment rides, and rock concert mecha platforms, created a 1:1 physical mockup of the MRAP and its interior (without wheels), in a Universal-Studios-style robotic motion-control platform, complete with large-scale monitors for the window views. This was suspended in a monstrous static frame with motorized gimbals, with only two degrees of freedom---a 24-degree pitch, and an insane 380 degrees of roll. For a multi-ton truck chassis.

But the 2-dof robot motion-control platform hardware had motors, but it had no control software. And the 6-dof video-game world had a virtual vehicle, but it had no real-life control software either.

That's when they called in Sequoia Consulting, to glue it together and make it all happen.

Contributions:

• Performed System Integration on the pieces of the project.
• Specified, designed, created, tested, and supported the key central mechatronics software "glue layer" between the video game and the physical robot, using control-theory mathematics.
• Created a special software "clutch" that shaded smoothly between unscripted free roaming and scripted roll-over motions, needed to ensure for safety that the hardware did not self-intersect.
• Created jostling special-effects motions for IED explosion hits, and APIs for other hardware practical effects, such as solenoids for actual physical explosion thunkers and small-arms plinkers.
• Supported on-site roll-out, installation & testing for the Army.

Both TSR and the Army were well please, and Sequoia was called back twice to augment upgrades to the system.