Abstract
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 fur realistic simulation of off-road vehicles. Delaunay triangulation is one of the most widely used methods in modeling 3-dimensional terrain surfaces, and the T-search is a relevant algorithm for searching resulting triangular polygons. The T-search method searches polygons in a 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. The dynamic T-search, which is proposed in this paper, combines conventional T-search and the concept of the dynmaic-window search which uses reduced searching windows or sets of triangular surface polygons at each frame by taking advantage of the information regarding dynamic charactereistics of a simulated vehicle. Numerical tests show improvement of searching speeds by about 5% for randomly distributed triangles. For continuous search following a vehicle path, which occurs in actual vehicle simulation, the searching speed becomes 4 times faster.
