During the Hannover Messe 2014 the ROboMObil was presented at the stand of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. Fair trade visitors were able to virtually drive the ROboMObil with the newly implemented Hardware in the Loop (HIL) system. People could sit inside the ROboMObil and use the sidestick to manoeuvre the research vehicle through a virtual city while exploring the fancy motion modes of this extraordinarily manoeuvrable vehicle.
In the background, the HIL simulated a full multi-body vehicle model emulating the behaviour and sensor data in the virtual environment. At the same time the controller software was running on the rapid control prototyping (RCP) real-time hardware build-in into the ROboMObil, as it would be a normal test drive. This proceeding enables safe and cost-efficient testing of the developed complex vehicle control software in a virtual setup before venturing real world drives. Furthermore, the 360° surround view with object detection was shown and many interesting technical discussions took place.