A Novel Approach for Real-Time Tire-Ground Enveloping Modeling

Over the past decades, simulation has become vital in vehicle development and virtual testing, especially for autonomous vehicles. High-performance hard real-time simulators, which are crucial for those undertakings, require efficient algorithms to accurately model vehicle behavior within virtual environments. A prime example is tire-ground contact modeling, which is pivotal if we aim to achieve a high level of realism when simulating wheeled vehicles. Contact modeling focuses on an accurate estimation of the parameters needed to compute the forces and torques generated by vehicle-ground interaction. However, the complexity of this task is compounded by the fact that tire-ground contact is a highly non-linear phenomenon, which is further exacerbated by the need to perform tests to fine-tune state-of-the-art tire-ground contact models. To tackle those challenges, we have developed a novel enveloping model that does not require any fitting of experimental data and is based on the 3D geometry of the intersection between undeformed volumes. In this manuscript, we provide a detailed description of the algorithm's formulation, the current software implementation (available as an open-source library), as well as the achieved scalability and real-time performance.