Linear Actuators are used in simulators in many different ways, from moving the chairs to sliding the pedals backwards and forwards. Simulators have a lot of moving components to make everything move and give the user the feeling that they are actually driving that car or actually flying that plane on the large screen in front of them. Aircraft simulators have the most amount of actuator requirements because they need to be able to roll, yaw and pitch during flight as well as lift vertically by several feel to give the feeling of raising or lowering in altitude. Each one of those movements requires a set of actuators.
www.Simcraft.com offer a range of simulators for both car racing and aircraft training that use a host of actuators in their machines, mostly Pneumatic because the need to move very quickly but they have also started to use Linear Actuator to move other components too.
Simulators
In this Simulator Simcraft show us how they used a Track Linear Actuator has been adopted in one of their car racing simulators to move the pedals back and forth to suite the drivers height and comfort level. The entire pedal assembly is attached to the Actuator and that entire assembly is what slides forwards and backwards along the length of the Track Actuators body. There is a control handle on the dashboard where the driver makes the adjustments to get comfortable before they begin their racing.
This is not the first time FIRGELLI Actuators are been used in simulators, they are used also for military gun range simulators to create moving targets and move objects around in the target field. Sometimes they are targets to hit, other times they are targets to avoid. Micro Actuators are specifically used for moving small objects quickly. The point is that Actuators are extremely versatile devices that can be used in many different applications for different purposes and are not overly expensive to implement.