Automatic correlated terrain database generation and management for ground vehicle simulators
Yiannis E. Papelis, Shawn Allen, Ben Wehrle · 1999
Modeling and interrogating the elevation of the terrain is necessary in both flight and driving simulation applications. In flight simulation, with the exception of ground based operations, the requirements for resolution and interrogation rate can often be met by the image generator or other simplified databases containing airports and the surrounding area. In ground vehicle simulators however, the requirements for interrogation rate, performance, resolution, and geographical coverage are much more stringent and separate databases are often used. Work described in this paper extends prior developments on correlated terrain databases specifically focused on driving simulation applications by adding key features on usability, correlated data generation, singularities, and performance. Key features of the earlier system included variable resolution storage, real-time execution time independent of the size of the database, and the ability to model vertically stacked terrain with minimal runtime overhead. Improvements of the new system include the automation of the database generation process given the source code of the visual databases, a new interrogation technique that eliminates distracting artifacts that appear across areas that have been sampled at different ,resolutions, and the use of graphical interactive tools for verifying the correlation of the final terrain database against the original visual model. The paper includes examples that demonstrate the process, along with information on the performance of the code under various conditions and computing systems. Introduction and Prior Work In ground vehicle simulators, where the interaction of the vehicle with the environment provides the majority of the feedback cues, a representation of the underlying terrain is critical for proper fidelity and realism. Copyright