NATC offers extensive experience in design and development solutions to vehicle mobility challenges, from the component level to systems and whole vehicles. Using knowledge gained and lessons learned throughout the years as a leader in on- and off-road vehicle development and testing, we are able to provide creative solutions to the most challenging mobility problems to help achieve our customers’ goals.

We develop unique mobility events to test vehicles in specific conditions, expose their limitations and identify potential areas of improvement. Examples of custom mobility events include creation and regulation of soft soil mobility courses with varying moisture contents and creation of unique obstacles such as log piles or specific grades. We look at dominant mobility metrics such as maximum speed, speed on grade, ride quality, tractive effort, stability, braking, etc. Ride quality assessments to improve overall vehicle speed, reduce system and occupant fatigue, and reduce life cycle costs are key parameters that can influence a vehicle design. Once a limitation is exposed, we work with our customers to design and develop comprehensive solutions. From isolating the tire-soil interaction on a vehicle to creating objective, holistic approaches to vehicle mobility, NATC identifies the problem and provides a comprehensive solution.

Mobility Solutions

Determined to accelerate next generation automotive technologies, NATC has proven knowledge of and commitment to developing systems that support autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle operation. We have over 50 years’ experience in conducting tests and working in a collaborative environment with our customers. Throughout the development process, we have come to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and historic basis for autonomous technologies and, therefore, the potential safety implications of their integration into full vehicle systems.

Testing new technology in a representative environment off public roads is a crucial step before highly automated vehicles can be deployed safely on public roadways. Working with local, state, and regional agencies and academia, our engineers have designed a unique environment for testing the capabilities of automated and connected vehicles and systems.

Our current, unique test events and capabilities targeting connected and autonomous vehicles include:

• Automatic emergency braking (AEB), lane detection warning (LDW), and forward collision warning (FCW) testing and event creation
• Electromagnetic interference and compatibility (EMI/EMC) susceptibility evaluations
• Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications testing
• Sensor durability, corrosion and contamination
• Dynamic obstacle identification and avoidance
• Tire blowouts
• Road departure and recovery on AASHTO compliant courses
• Lane change obstacle avoidance
• 1.8-mile paved oval with banked turns, on-ramp and off-ramp
• Skid pad with 500-foot radius, sprinklers, and low, medium, and split coefficient surfaces
• Rutted and degraded pavement with and without lane markers and signage
• Gravel and off-road courses with varied elevation, slope and turns
• Speed bumps, curbing and parking stalls
• Flooded, paved roadway at depths in inches or feet
• Temporary traffic controls
• Potholes, road hazards
• Handheld signage and traffic directing
• Agricultural and off-highway vehicle road sharing
• Simulated tree covering
• Simulated dust/debris storm
• Shock and vibration

NATC is highly skilled in integrating intelligent systems into existing vehicle systems as well as original design solutions for next generation systems. Today’s systems require complimentary integration of subsystem functions with the vehicle platform. To achieve this we use a method of network/system architecture design that maximizes performance while allowing for future growth in terms of functionality and system bandwidth.  Intelligent systems integration typically includes engine, transmission, ABS, ATC, ESC, CTIS, suspension, ride height, hydraulics, steering, and electrical power but other unique systems are implemented based on the vehicle’s mission or performance requirements. We utilize a cohesive environment that allows development of controls using modeling, control validation using bench simulation, and finalized systems application to the vehicle platform. Intelligent controls are incorporated into vehicle systems to reduce operator workload, improve vehicle efficiency and performance, incorporate drive-by-wire controls, and support autonomous operation.

Autonomous & Intelligent Vehicle Systems

NATC has been committed to the development of unique vehicle electronics and automotive specific acquisition systems for 40 years. Our electronic systems are developed for incorporation into military and commercial vehicles. Our development paradigm represents collaboration between our clients, our partners and our development team to ensure all vehicle operational requirements are met. We remain committed to developing electronic systems that not only meet the vehicle specific operational requirements but that also push the envelope in automotive development efforts. We continue to enhance vehicle electronics capabilities through unique development efforts driven by current real-world vehicle operational requirements.

Our vehicle electronic advancement efforts are focused primarily in the following areas.

• Complex vehicle communication networks
  • Our primary efforts in vehicle communication revolve around SAE J1939 which we helped develop. We use organic established methods of incorporating multiple SAE J1939 networks into the same vehicle platform while maintaining seamless data bridging between networks. Ethernet networks are also incorporated and develop unique vehicle electronic controllers to bridge data between incompatible network architectures for vehicle diagnostic and prognostic efforts.
• Intelligent power distribution systems
  • We develop platform specific intelligent power distribution systems for automotive applications including intelligent load switching and control, load monitoring, and degraded environment vehicle load shedding. We integrate high voltage and high power generators requiring platform specific voltage conversion systems to support standard military and commercial vehicle power networks.
• Vehicle electronic control unit (ECU) design, and unique automotive test article evaluation systems
  • We leverage micro-controller based ECU design and vehicle integration experience onto today’s vehicle platforms. These improvement efforts include vehicle specific hardware and software designs to support vehicle I/O requirements, automotive evaluation data acquisition systems, and test article signal conditioning and controller electronics.

NATC conducts safety assessments for developmental and production vehicles across the automotive industry. Developing a safe vehicle platform has and always will be an underlying requirement for any program, and we focus on completing effective safety assessments in support of safety releases. Our experienced engineers compile safety assessments on vehicles ranging from off-road utility vehicles to nuclear transport vehicles, with corresponding metrics for safety. We utilize applicable standards for human machine interface (HMI) features as part of the initial safety inspection of the vehicle, followed by analysis of vehicle subsystems with the intent of providing a thorough and fresh perspective on a vehicle’s design for safety features. We keep our customers’ objectives in mind when completing these safety assessments: providing buyers with safe vehicles and preventing long-term safety issues with a vehicle or subsystem platform.

We provide custom, full vehicle safety assessments extending beyond simply meeting FMVSS, MIL-STD, SAE, or other applicable testing requirements.  For example, switch locations, visibility for a fifth percentile female, or cruise control settings when a tire blows can often be overlooked. We develop safety checklists and shakedown ride procedures to use in addition to initial inspections and safety checklists provided by OEMs.

Further, we assist in developing safety releases and reports for prototype vehicles. We offer preliminary hazard analysis in support of government safety releases, field user evaluations, and other pre-production level efforts, and we apply our risk mitigation techniques throughout the process. We develop tools for assessing risk levels and determining whether risk levels warrant mitigation due to secondary effects on the project or vehicle as a whole.

NATC excels at maintaining representative and repeatable test courses, which is key to our history of success in vehicle testing and duty cycle correlation. We ensure that each test course is adequately representative of the real-word user environment as it was designed to be. To do so, we continuously use our Dynamic Force Measuring Vehicle (DFMV) to monitor test courses and ensure they meet the required roughness levels and frequency content. We further utilize the DFMV in field studies to quantify real-world terrains ranging from super highways to cross-country. This continual terrain profiling effort provides our customers with up-to-date measured and repeatable data that can be correlated to the duty cycle test operations.

The DFMV is a vital element in our arsenal for understanding vehicle and tire dynamics and quantifying terrain inputs to vehicles. The DFMV is equipped with longitudinal, lateral, and vertical force transducers, accelerometers, and a wheel speed sensor at each wheel end, allowing continuous measurement of all forces, accelerations, and speed involved with the dynamic measurement activity. Additionally, data accumulated by the DFMV are used in scaling equations to establish the accelerated durability test criteria for any vehicle in virtually any environmental condition.

The operating conditions of the intended duty cycle environment are established through research and actual measurement of specifics to the intended market. Information collected from the DFMV is used to select appropriate test courses, thereby tailoring each durability test to the test vehicle’s actual duty cycle environment. Our test parameters include any combination of paved road, unpaved road, cross-country, and severe cross-country surfaces–each designed and constructed to provide accurate simulations of commercial, government, and international proving grounds, and approved for certification to commercial and military standards.

NATC’s technical and diverse engineering staff provide the experience and holistic view necessary for analyzing and designing complex vehicle systems and providing engineering solutions over the systems’ life cycles. We work with our customers not only in the development cycle to identify requirements and system validation, but also during post-production to improve the design configuration or adjust it to match emerging requirements.

We help our customers to positively respond as vehicle development continues to face more stringent regulatory requirements with shorter development cycles and increased complexity. We perform verification and validation of these systems early in the product development cycle, which leads to better quality, lower life cycle cost, shorter development time lines, and manageable risk. We provide system engineering and technical management expertise to address these challenges that often extend beyond the traditional engineering paradigm by treating technological systems as parts of a larger whole.

We have a wide technical knowledge domain and a staff from several engineering disciplines capable of problem solving using well-defined methods to drive the balanced development of system products and processes. We build clean sheet prototypes and technology demonstrators, developing and designing unique architecture with systems such as digitally controlled powertrain and drive train, electronically controlled suspension, ABS/ESC, digital backbone, intelligent power management, situational awareness, and communications. We develop sophisticated engineering models for use in simulation and combinatorial trade study down-selects to predict performance of complex designs in a fully functional virtual world. This methodology ensures stakeholder objectives and requirements are met in the most efficient way considering cost, schedule, and performance.

NATC provides complete CAD, 3-D scanning, and reverse engineering services using the latest hardware and software.  Whether our customers need to verify as-built components to theoretical 3-D CAD models, generate 3-D CAD models from actual components, analyze test articles before and after testing, or simply have a digitized 3-D record of an item, we are the one-stop solution. We cover a wide array of applications ranging from small, intricate parts to whole vehicles.

We create surfaces/solid models, which are useful in:

• FEA modeling & simulations
• Volume, mass, or center of gravity calculations
• CAM (CNC machining)
• Mechanical CAD assemblies
• 2-D engineering drawing development

We use 3-D scanning for specific applications to include:

• Comparison of scanned data to nominal 3-D CAD data to verify as-built components
• Generation of 3-D CAD data if not previously available
• Comparison of test articles before and after test events to analyze deformation and structural integrity

Our extensive fabrication experience, materials knowledge, and modeling and simulation tools provide the background for designing components that can be manufactured for any application. Additionally, we provide developmental and production level Technical Data Packages in accordance with MIL-STD-31000 and drawings conforming to the latest ASME drawing standards.

Other areas of NATC CAD experience include:

• Electro-mechanical design
• Manufacturing design
• Castings design
• Precision machining design
• Freeform surface modeling

NATC offers a full range of computer aided engineering (CAE) capabilities, covering finite element analysis (FEA) of components up to simulation of full system multi-body dynamics.  We work with our customers to tailor, as needed, all aspects of design, development, and testing, including simulation and validation, fatigue life estimations, threat survivability analysis, and component failure analysis.  We perform virtual tests of full vehicle models to analyze and predict vehicle ride quality and dynamics, both over digitized versions of actual test courses and through discrete test events.  We use physical test data to calibrate, verify, and validate models, allowing for vehicle handling predictions and failure prediction and analysis.  We also perform FEA to suggest locations for monitoring strain and optimizing data collection during physical testing.

NATC’s CAE capabilities include:

• Full vehicle dynamic modeling/simulation
• Ride quality, handling, and mobility analysis
• Test data analysis and model correlation
• Component load case generation
• Finite element analysis with fatigue life prediction capability
• Soft soil traction simulation
• Threat survivability simulation and analysis
• Control system modeling and integration
• Modal and resonance analysis
• Fuel and electrical energy consumption
• Fuel and nonfuel vehicle operating costs

Full Vehicle Dynamic Modeling/Simulation