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

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 low overhead 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.