SIMSCAPE: Terrain modeling toolkit

Planetary space mission applications involving landers and surface exploration vehicles make extensive use of terrain models within their simulation testbeds. Such terrain models are large, complex and have a variety of attributes including topography, reflectivity, soil mechanics, and hazard information. Sources for the terrain models include planetary data archives, field tests, and analytically constructed models. Simulation uses of such models include surface rover vehicles' kinematics and dynamics models, instrument models, camera models and robotic arm models. This paper describes the SIMSCAPE middleware toolkit for providing a common infrastructure to represent terrain model data from multiple data sources and make them available to simulation applications. SIMSCAPE simplifies the overall simulation design by eliminating the traditional need for custom terrain model interfaces to terrain data sources for simulation users. SIMSCAPE provides a collection of libraries and tools to use and manage terrain environment models within the simulation applications.