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1 This paper describes a modeling, simulation, and visualization framework aimed at enabling physics-based analysis of ground vehicle mobility. This framework, called Chrono, has been built to leverage parallel computing both on distributed and shared memory architectures. Chrono is both modular and extensible. Modularity stems from the design decision to build vertical applications whose goal is to reduce the end-to-end time from vision-to-model-to-solution-to-visualization for a targeted application field. The extensibility is a consequence of the design of the foundation modules, which can be enhanced with new features that benefit all the vertical applications. Two factors motivated the development of Chrono. First, there is a manifest need of modeling approaches and simulation tools to support mobility analysis on deformable terrain.

This paper presents a computational framework for the physics-based simulation of light vehicles operating on discrete terrain. The focus is on characterizing through simulation the mobility of vehicles that weigh 1000 pounds or less, such as a reconnaissance robot. The terrain is considered to be deformable and is represented as a collection of bodies of spherical shape. The modeling stage relies on a novel formulation of the frictional contact problem that requires at each time step of the numerical simulation the solution of an optimization problem. The proposed computational framework, when run on ubiquitous Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) cards, allows the simulation of systems in which the terrain is represented by more than 0.5 million bodies leading to problems with more than one million degrees of freedom.