The SAVE Program - Teaching Vehicle Control to SAVE Soldiers Lives

Sally Shoop and Barry Coutermarsh, research engineers at the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab, discussed the SAVE (Synthetic Automotive Virtual Environments) program, which aims to building hardware and software that can teach soldiers how to control a vehicle to avoid accidents and rollovers, and save the lives of military and civilian vehicle operators.

Three times as many soldiers are killed in vehicle accidents than in combat. To get technology for accident avoidance training into the hands of our soldiers, first you have to have good models for road surfaces encountered in military operations so that the vehicle dynamics is accurate enough to respond like a real vehicle.

Two characteristics that make this SAVE distinctive from others are the ability to add unique surface environments into models and a partnership with top experts in the field, including Team ONeil Rally School and Vehicle Control Training (VCT) of Franconia, NH, MIT, Georgia Tech, Ford Motor Company, SimCraft, and the Mechanical Simulation Corporation.