Featuring one of the world’s most advanced vehicle simulators, the new £2 million R&D center in Hethel, Norfolk is officially open for business.
The new facility will be used to develop and showcase simulation technologies which can prove vital when it comes to testing and developing vehicles in virtual environments.
The new Delta series simulator, belonging to Ansible Motion, is arguably the star of the facility. It’s powered by no fewer than 16 5GHz computers and features a six degrees of freedom motion system. It also comes with five projectors, a full control room able to monitor 300 channels of data, a separate viewing gallery and secure conference rooms.
But back to the 16 5GHz computers for a bit. That’s a lot of processing power – so just imagine how well your favorite PC games would run on that setup.
As for Ansible Motion, their simulators are currently being used by vehicle manufacturers and motorsport engineers for both development and testing phases. The simulators can be used to validate safety systems, vehicle settings and define aero, gearbox and suspension settings for F1 teams.
The virtual world environment helps engineers cut a vehicle’s test program by months, with significant cost savings.
Ansible Motion founder, Kia Cammaerts said that their simulator has “cut the validation time from 10 days to just three for an Electronic Stability Control programme for one particular car maker. Apply those kinds of savings in cost and time across the whole car and it explains why we are now getting more and more enquiries from global OEMs to see what our simulator can do. This R&D Centre will enable automotive engineers to assess how our simulator performs and it also serves as an internal development resource to ensure our simulators, built here in Norfolk, remain at the leading edge of this invaluable technology.”
The best part is that Ansible Motion opened the R&D Center to visitors, which is really the best way to do it. People need to be shown, not told, when it comes to these sort of things.
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