A Study on Terrain Surface Modeling and Polygon-Searching Algorithms

지표면 모델링 및 폴리건 검색기법에 관한 연구

Terrain surfaces have to be modeled in very detail and wheel-surface contacting geometry must be well defined in order to obtain proper ground-reaction and friction forces for realistic simulation of off-road vehicles. Delaunay triangulation is one of the most widely used methods in modeling 3-dimensional terrain surfaces, and T-search is a relevant algorithm for searching resulting triangular polygons. The T-search method searches polygons in successive order and may not allow real-time computation of off-road vehicle dynamics if the terrain is modeled with many polygons, depending on the computer performance used in the simulation. In order to accelerate the searching speed of T-search, a terrain database of triangular polygons is modeled in multi-levels by adopting the LOD (Level of Detail) method used in realtime computer graphics. Simulation results show that the new LOD search is effective in shortening the required computing time. The LOD search can be even further accelerated by introducing an NN (Neural Network) algorithm, in the cases where a appropriate range of moving paths can be predicted by cultual information of the simulated terrain, such as lakes, houses, etc.. Numerical tests show that LOD-NN search almost double the speed of the original T-search.