Abstract
Techniques for modeling deformable terrain span an entire range varying in complexity, representation accuracy, and ensuing computational effort. While formulations such as fully-resolved granular dynamics, continuum representation of granular material, or finite element can provide a high level of accuracy, they do so at a significant cost, even when the implementation leverages parallel computing and/or hardware accelerators. Real-time or faster than real-time terramechanics is a highly desired capability (in applications such as training of autonomous vehicles and robotic systems) or critical capability (in applications such as human-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop).
We present a real-time capable deformable soil implementation, extended from the Soil Contact Model (SCM) developed at the German Aerospace Center which in turn can be viewed as a generalization of the Bekker-Wong and Janosi-Hanamoto semi-empirical models for soil interaction with arbitrary three-dimensional shapes and arbitrary contact patches. This SCM implementation is available, alongside more computationally intensive deformable soil representations, in the open-source multi-physics package Chrono. We describe the overall implementation and the features of the Chrono SCM model, the efficient underlying data structures, the current multi-core parallelization aspects, and its scalability properties for concurrent simulation of multiple vehicles on deformable terrain.
