Racing Simulator: From Arcade Cabinets to ABB Arms

A racing simulator tries to make a driver believe they are on a real track while they sit in a room that never moves very far. It started as a coin-operated game with a steering wheel and grew into motion platforms that tilt and shake the seat, million-pound rigs that race teams use between events, and kits that now bolt under a cockpit at home. This post follows that path from Pole Position and Sega's moving cabinets to the six-legged Stewart platform, robot-arm simulators and the home motion systems shipping this autumn. It ends with the places where ABB robots and RobotStudio could plausibly fit in.

A visitor drives a racing simulator with three screens at the Construma exhibition in Budapest, 2015. Photo: Derzsi Elekes Andor / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How arcade cabinets and tyre rigs built the racing simulator

The first driving games put a wheel in front of a screen. Namco's Pole Position, published by Atari in 1982, sold itself on Formula 1 realism, with a qualifying lap before each race and rival cars to crash into. Tatsumi's TX-1 followed in 1983 with three screens and force feedback that made the wheel vibrate. In 1985 Yu Suzuki's team at Sega built Hang-On, whose deluxe cabinet was a motorbike the player leaned to steer. Out Run came in 1986 with a hydraulic motion cabinet, and it became the highest grossing arcade game of 1987 worldwide.

A Pole Position II sit-down arcade cabinet, the 1983 sequel to Namco's 1982 racer. Photo: 空練 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The moving seat itself came from engineering labs. At the Dunlop tyre factory in Birmingham, Eric Gough built a universal tyre testing machine with six jacks under one plate, and it was working by 1954. In 1962 the American engineer Klaus Cappel developed the same hexapod on his own and licensed it to flight simulator companies. D. Stewart described the layout in a 1965 paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the name Stewart platform stuck. Six actuators can move the top plate in all six directions a free body can move: up, sideways, forward, pitch, roll and yaw.

Two hexapod positioners, the six-legged layout known as the Stewart platform. Photo: Mike1024 via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Flight simulators adopted it first. By 1962 Redifon offered motion simulators for airliners such as the Boeing 707 and the Vickers Viscount. Driving simulators borrowed the same base and often mounted it on large X-Y tables, so the cab could slide to give a short push of acceleration and tilt to fake a long one. At home, PC games did the physics work long before seats moved: Papyrus released IndyCar Racing in 1993 and Grand Prix Legends in 1998, and Gran Turismo arrived on consoles in 1997. Wheel and pedal sets made the home rig a hobby of its own.

An Air Canada flight simulator cab on its six hydraulic jacks, 1975. Photo: Piergiuliano Chesi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Racing simulators today, from team rigs to robot arms

Race teams and car makers now run driver-in-the-loop simulators, where a human drives a virtual car whose behaviour comes from engineering models. On 30 September 2026 Automotive World reported that IAAPS, an engineering and testing company owned by the University of Bath, has paired an Ansible Motion Delta S2 simulator with its 1,800 kW four-wheel-drive powertrain test bed at the Bristol and Bath Science Park. A driver in the simulator steers a virtual car while a real electric, hybrid or combustion powertrain answers on the test bed. The rig has already been used in race preparation for F1 Academy driver Rachel Robertson.

A McLaren Formula 1 car set up as a simulator at a sponsor event, 2011. Photo: Jack Lenox / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robot arms were tried as simulators more than fifteen years ago. In 2010 the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen showed its CyberMotion Simulator, a KUKA KR 500 industrial robot carrying a cabin with a force feedback wheel, pedals and a curved projection screen, with a virtual Ferrari F2007 lapping Monza. The institute built it to study how people sense motion, and a later 10 m linear axis gave the cabin even more room to move. The same idea carries riders at theme parks, which we covered in our post on robot arm rides.

A KUKA Robocoaster 4D simulator giving rides at a public celebration in Munich, 2012. Photo: digital cat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB does not sell a racing simulator or a passenger-rated robot, and we found no ABB arm in a sim racing rig, so this part is about possibilities. A large arm such as the IRB 6700 or the IRB 7720, which carries up to 620 kg, has the payload for a cockpit, but carrying a person would need certification ABB robots do not have. ABB's closer link is software. RobotStudio is a simulator for robots, running the same program on a virtual controller that later runs on the real arm. On the factory side, cobots like GoFa could assemble wheel bases and pedal sets, though we found no maker doing that today.

Two engineers program an ABB IRB 7710 or IRB 7720 large robot with a FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Where racing simulators go next, at home and in the lab

Motion is moving into the home. MOZA launched its HMA150 on 28 July 2026, a set of four actuators that lifts a whole cockpit with up to 150 mm of travel, speeds up to 300 mm/s and a payload of up to 350 kg, priced at $2,999. BoxThisLap reported on 2 October that the first units were reaching customers and that new orders had moved to November. That puts full cockpit motion within reach of a sim racer who already owns a rig and a wheel base.

Racing driver Esteban Guerrieri tries a sim racing rig at a race event, 2017. Photo: Krémer Krisztián via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In labs and factories, simulators are becoming test benches. The IAAPS rig shows the next step: a virtual car, a real driver and a real powertrain in one loop, so engineers can try a design before a prototype exists. Robot cells follow the same pattern. Engineers build and test the program in RobotStudio, as described in our post on simulation and digital twins, and only then run it on the real robot. A robot arm cockpit could reach poses a hexapod cannot, but it needs a large room, heavy foundations and a full safety case.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

Commercial driver-in-the-loop rigs are bought by teams, car makers and research centres, and home motion still costs more than many players spend on the rest of their setup. Safety is the other worry. A platform that moves up to 350 kg with a person on top needs solid mounting, emergency stops and a clear area, and a robot arm would need fences, monitored zones and tools like SafeMove. Tuning motion cues so they feel right without making the driver sick also takes skill, and few home users have learned it yet.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

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