Fast Simulation of Vehicles with Non-deformable Tracks
This addresses the need for efficient simulation of tracked vehicles in robotics, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing general-purpose simulators.
The paper tackles the problem of simulating vehicles with non-deformable tracks by proposing a novel technique called Contact Surface Motion, which enables fast and plausible simulation, and it is implemented as a plugin for Gazebo using the Open Dynamics Engine.
This paper presents a novel technique that allows for both computationally fast and sufficiently plausible simulation of vehicles with non-deformable tracks. The method is based on an effect we have called Contact Surface Motion. A comparison with several other methods for simulation of tracked vehicle dynamics is presented with the aim to evaluate methods that are available off-the-shelf or with minimum effort in general-purpose robotics simulators. The proposed method is implemented as a plugin for the open-source physics-based simulator Gazebo using the Open Dynamics Engine.