OxTS is releasing a tool to help customers place cones accurately on proving grounds. Cone placement started as a small request but everyone we have talked to has been excited by it. Cones are an essential aid to help drivers carry out some tests with high precision but putting the cones down accurately by hand is challenging and time consuming. The new “Cones” tool in Enginuity makes it much quicker to place cones accurately.
The positions of the cones are loaded from a simple CSV file. We have made some templates in Excel to create simple cone placement layouts. The Excel data can be exported to CSV before being loaded in to Enginuity. RT-Range customers can use the line survey tool to survey cone positions and then move the cone pattern to another location or replace them at a later time.
The CSV file lists the position of the cones in XY co-ordinates, then Enginuity is used to “move” the cones to the latitude and longitude of the VDA. A rotation angle can be entered so that the X-axis of the file can be aligned to a specific heading. To make this quick the local co-ordinates of the RT or the position and angle of the RT can be used for the origin of the cones.
Using Google Earth, the position of the cones can be visualised before they are placed. This can be useful for planning the cone layout on the VDA before going to the vehicle.
The cones can’t be placed at the location of the RT (which is normally under the vehicle) so an offset to another location on the car can be used. This is configured in the software (below, left). A detailed window shows the position of the cone as the driver approaches the spot where it is to be placed (below, right).
An overview window can be used to track the overall progress.
Some templates have been made in Excel so that simple lane change and slalom tests can be created. We expect to create more templates in the future and we would welcome any templates customers create too.
Please do not hesitate to contact us, if you have any questions about our new cone placement tool.
The Google images in this document have been created from a licensed version of Google Earth Pro. Copyright of the images remains with Google.
