Title: Deformable soil with adaptive level of detail for tracked and wheeled vehicles

Authors: Alessandro Tasora; Dario Mangoni; Dan Negrut; Radu Serban; Paramsothy Jayakumar

Addresses: Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, 43100 Parma, Italy ' Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, 43100 Parma, Italy ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1572, USA ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1572, USA ' US Army Tank Automotive Research, Development, and Engineering Center, Warren, MI 48397-5000, USA

Abstract: This paper describes a model for deformable soil based on triangular meshes with vertical deformation. Such soil model can be used in a multi-body simulation environment to study the performance of wheeled or tracked vehicles. The formulation is inspired by the soil contact model (SCM), but unlike the original idea, our implementation uses triangular meshes with arbitrary topology. We leverage on this representation of the soil in order to provide a system that automatically refines the level of detail (LOD) of the mesh when tyres or track shoes sink into the soil; this allows the use of coarse meshes as initial approximations of large areas, for the sake of faster performance and lowoverhead on computer memory. A general-purpose collision detection algorithm is used to detect the shape of contacting objects, hence allowing the use of generic geometries to represent lugs, tyre threads, or even track shoes or robotic legs. The method has also been tested with deformable tyres.

Keywords: soil model; soft soil; terramechanics; Project Chrono; off-road vehicles.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVP.2019.097098

International Journal of Vehicle Performance, 2019 Vol.5 No.1, pp.60 - 76

Received: 16 Jul 2017
Accepted: 16 Dec 2017
Published online: 19 Dec 2018 *

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