An Application of Multiresolution Massive Surface Representations to the Simulation of Asteroid Missions

We report on a real-time application supporting fast, realistic real-time rendering of asteroid datasets, as well as collision detection and response between the asteroid and prototype robotic surface exploration vehicles. The system organizes the asteroid surface into a two-level multiresolution structure, which embeds a fine-grained per-patch spatial index within a coarse-grained patch-based structure. The coarse-grained structure, maintained out-of-core, is used for fast batched I/O and GPU accelerated rendering, while the per-patch fine-grained structure is used to accelerate raycasting and collision queries. The resulting system has been tested with a simple robot lander and surface exploration simulator. The system models gravity using mass particles uniformly distributed within the asteroid bodies. Real-time performance is achieved on a commodity platform with giga triangle representations of asteroids 25143 Itokawa and 433 Eros.

@InProceedings{PGMTC10,
  author       = {Pintore, G. and Gobbetti, E. and Marton, F. and Turner, R. and Combet, R.},
  title        = {An Application of Multiresolution Massive Surface Representations to the Simulation of Asteroid Missions},
  booktitle    = {Eurographics Italian Chapter Conference},
  pages        = {9--16},
  month        = {november},
  year         = {2010},
  publisher    = {Eurographics Association},
  organization = {Eurographics},
  address      = {Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland},
  note         = {Conference held in Genoa, Italy},
  keywords     = {massive model rendering, asteroid exploration planning},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2010/PGMTC10},
}