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

Abstract

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 perpatch 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.