Advances in Physically-Based Modeling of Deformable Soil for Real-Time Operator Training Simulators

In recent years, realistic simulation of vehicles on soft terrain has increasingly gained importance due to its use in operator training, mission planning and design. In this work we present a method which is tailored to the requirements of real-time simulation of soft soil in Virtual Reality applications. We combine models from terramechanics and soil mechanics in order to represent the interaction of vehicles and their digging tools with a deformable terrain, allowing us to simulate a broad range of vehicles, including earth moving equipment and planetary rovers on soft ground in real-time. We consider the impact of both wheel - ground and tool - ground interactions on the vehicle behavior by creating a fully coupled simulation of the dynamics of the vehicle and its environment. Furthermore we present verification experiments which show that our wheel - ground interaction method yields realistic results.