Advanced Rendering Cluster for Highway Experimental Research (ARCHER)
Jason Williams, Tsai-Chia Chou, Barry Wallick, M Joseph Moyer · 2005
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Highway Driving Simulator (HDS) has been undergoing a major upgrade to a PC-based cluster rendering system. This new systems is dubbed “Advanced Rendering Cluster for Highway Experimental Research”, or ARCHER. ARCHER is written in C++ and Java™, and utilizes open-source libraries such as Open GL™, sgl (scene graph library), and cg™ (dynamic shading). Linux is the primary platform and RealTime ™ technology products, Generic Vehicle Dynamics System™ (GVDS) and the MotionTilt™ library, are used for vehicle dynamics and motion based controls. The challenge was to create a flexible and upgradeable system with multi-channeled project support, while still maintaining a high frame rate for scenes containing highly complex roadway and roadside geometry. Night and day scenarios, realistic vegetation, retro-reflective signs and pavement markings, and the capability to create new non-standard traffic control devices, signs and pavement markings area all critical capabilities of the new system. The new scenario creation methods used in ARCHER has the capability to use geographic databases, such as the United State Geological Survey (USGS) digital elevation and image database, in order to quickly create realistic scenes based on actual roadways under study. The roadways themselves can be ingested from either global position systems (GPS) traces from a driven vehicle, or for high-resolution geometry, from the FHWA’s Digital Highway Measurement (DHM) van. The DHM is a suite of instruments on a single vehicle platform designed to provide accurate and efficient measurements of roadway geometry, roadside hardware and pavement conditions. Such accurate field measurements significantly improve the ability of researchers to compare driver behavior derived from real-world roadway data and data collected in a simulator. Recently the DHM van was used to collect roadway and roadside data to create a model of a Pennsylvania road for a joint Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) FHWA Driving simulator study. This paper describes how the ARCHER system was conceived and implemented to support FHWA behavioral research on highway safety operations.