By ATN
Summary: KTM is using rFpro’s engineering-grade simulation software to develop and validate advanced headlight systems earlier in the development cycle. The virtual environment allows engineers to assess beam throw, brightness, adaptive behaviour and rider perception before physical prototypes are built, reducing reliance on real-world night testing. KTM uses a LiDAR-based digital twin of a public road near Mattighofen, along with VR headsets featuring eye-tracking, to evaluate lighting performance under realistic dynamic conditions.
Key engineering takeaway: High-fidelity simulation integrates full motorcycle dynamics (lean, pitch, roll) with physically accurate light modelling, including retroreflectivity and HD lighting calculations. This enables validation of adaptive LED and matrix headlights against real-world infrastructure interactions while correlating virtual and physical test data.
Why it matters: Motorcycle headlight design is uniquely complex due to lean angles and rider exposure, making traditional night testing costly and risky. Moving validation into simulation accelerates development, improves safety, and supports the growing sophistication of adaptive lighting and control systems.
Headlight simulation reduces reliance on real-world night driving
Vehicle manufacturer KTM is using rFpro’s simulation software to develop, test and evaluate headlight systems across its product range, enabling the company to assess complex lighting behaviour earlier in the vehicle development process.
KTM is using rFpro’s engineering-grade virtual environment during the pre-development phase to support the design and optimisation of headlights, including beam throw, brightness and functional behaviour. The approach allows engineers to review headlight performance in a highly realistic simulation before physical prototypes are available.
By shifting more of the headlight development process into simulation, KTM reduces its reliance on real-world night driving, which is time-consuming, costly and often constrained by safety and environmental factors. This issue is pronounced for motorcycles where the rider is exposed to the elements and winter testing can be unsafe.
“Advanced headlight systems must perform consistently across a wide range of riding conditions,” said Philipp Schweigerer, Optical Engineer R&D, at KTM. “Simulation allows us to evaluate light distribution, dynamics and rider perception much earlier in development. The strong correlation we see between virtual and physical testing gives us confidence in using simulation as part of our overall validation strategy.”
“Motorcycle headlight systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, particularly as adaptive and matrix technologies move into production,” said Nick Harrison, Development Director at rFpro. “The combination of complex vehicle dynamics and advanced control software makes early development and validation essential. rFpro enables manufacturers like KTM to evaluate both the subjective rider experience and the underlying engineering performance long before physical testing would traditionally begin, saving significant time and cost.”
Designing headlights for motorcycles presents unique challenges compared with passenger cars, particularly due to vehicle lean angle during cornering. This makes masking out oncoming traffic with high beams challenging, placing greater demands on both hardware design and control strategies. With the increasing adoption of adaptive LED and matrix-style headlights on motorcycles, systems must also account for lean angle, pitch and dynamic movement, alongside inputs from cameras and multi-axis inertial measurement units.
Engineers can review headlight performance both statically and dynamically, taking into account full vehicle dynamics, including pitch, roll and lean. rFpro’s road surface model is accurate to 1cm in the horizontal and 1mm in the vertical, enabling vehicle dynamics to be accurately simulated.
KTM’s development team uses a desktop-based simulator with virtual reality headsets to experience rFpro’s simulation environment and assess headlight performance from the rider’s perspective. The headsets are equipped with eye-tracking technology, allowing engineers to see precisely where users are looking when discussing potential improvements or changes.
The KTM team use a digital twin of a public road near its factory in Mattighofen in Austria to conduct its testing. The model was built by rFpro using LiDAR scan data. It enables the team to easily migrate from simulation to the real world to correlate data.
rFpro has also released a significant “Night Driving” update, a major software enhancement designed to increase the realism of light simulation. A key feature of this update is the introduction of physically accurate retroreflectivity.
In the simulation, every material is assigned accurate physical definitions. When headlight beams strike road infrastructure, such as cat’s eyes, traffic signs, or road markings, the light reflects exactly as it would in the real world back to the rider. The update also includes a High Definition lighting mode, which improves the calculation of light behaviour to deliver higher fidelity simulation data.
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