Lunar Rover Virtual Simulation System over A 3D Terrain Environment

Virtual Reality Simulation plays important role in teleoperation of lunar rovers during exploration phase as well as in the design of rover and its systems, performance evaluation during R&D phase. Present simulation methods for lunar rovers have several drawbacks in terms of difficulty in simulating terrains, rover terrain interfaces, simulating dynamics of slip and slide to realize smooth mobility in simulation systems. Considering this, our paper presents an approach to construct a virtual simulation system that integrates the rover modelling, terrain construction and mobility of rover using ADAMS-Matlab interface. In addition to this we have simulated terrain using 3dsMax software and a suitable program is developed in Matlab to simulate the 3D representation of terrain in ADAMS. The 3D model of terrain is also developed using Matlab software and the rover model is constructed with ADAMS. By interfacing ADAMS with Matlab a suitable virtual simulation system is constructed to implement the behaviour of rover over terrain environment. The controller is implemented by using Matlab/Simulink to carry out joint simulation with ADAMS. This paper will provide a method for teleoperation and gives performance analysis in different terrain environments. The simulation environment runs on Z-400 workstation with 16GB RAM. Real tests require equipped rover platform and a realistic terrain. It is very time consuming and high cost. To improve the development efficiency, a rover simulation environment that affords real-time capabilities with high fidelity has been developed. We have made use of FBM technique as well a other software techniques to generate lunar surface as well as its features like crater. The lunar rover is modelled using ADAMS software with high realism is integrated in the visualization environment. The dynamics of rover is tested in Matlab-ADAMS simulation environment.