How to Simulate Blade Interacting with Terrain for Grading

[Sina Qahremani]

I’m looking to simulate a blade that can move over deformable terrain and reshape it realistically, similar to a grading task.

What I want:

• A blade I can control (position, orientation, height)

• A terrain that visibly deforms as the blade moves

• A simple and clear example or guide to get started

Any method that achieves realistic soil-blade interaction is fine.

If anyone has suggestions, code, or a better approach for this kind of simulation, I’d really appreciate the help!

[Harry ZHANG]

Hello!

We are actually doing a similar project (blade soil interaction), which will be concluded shortly. We can get back to you around 10 days and share whatever we got at that time.

Best,

Harry

[Sina Qahremani]

Hi Harry,

Thank you for your response — that’s great to hear! I’m really looking forward to it.

I had a quick follow-up: will your code be available online at some point?
If there’s an early version or a public GitHub repository, I’d really appreciate it if you could share the link.

Thanks again,
Sina

[Dan Negrut]

Sina – there’s a paper that the lab is working on. When we submit the paper, we’ll make the manuscript available on arxiv and the accompanying code in github. The model is a wheeled bulldozer.

The plan is to wrap this up in the next 10 days. One of us will follow up in this thread with the arxiv & github information.

Dan

---------------------------------------------

Bernard A. and Frances M. Weideman Professor

NVIDIA CUDA Fellow

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Department of Computer Science

University of Wisconsin - Madison

4150ME, 1513 University Avenue

Madison, WI 53706-1572

608 772 0914

http://sbel.wisc.edu/

http://projectchrono.org/

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[Ruochun Zhang]

Hi Sina,

Just to add yet another approach to what other people are suggesting... If you are open to using DEM to simulate it, Chrono DEM-Engine offers the capability and a demo featuring a similar simulation. You can check out the rendering of the demo here. You can refer to its README document for how to build and run the package. 

The limitation would be that there's no ready-to-use interactive control of the blade, and it's expected that you control it using predefined motion or a programmable custom policy. Also, you need a Linux machine with GPUs to run it; however, in a few short days, the WSL and Windows version will be made available for everyone.

Thank you!

Ruochun

[Sina Qahremani]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to check in and see if there are any updates on your sections of the paper.

Thanks,

Sina

[Harry ZHANG]

Hello Sina,

we wrote a demo to demonstrate the "bulldozer" (gator + front blade) pushing a pile of soil (represented using CRM terrain). The demo is here: https://github.com/uwsbel/chrono-wisc/blob/project/leveling/src/demos/vehicle/terrain/demo_VEH_CRMTerrain_Gator.cpp. Notice this demo is at "chrono-wisc" instead of main chrono repo, so to run the same demo, I would suggest you to clone chrono-wisc repo: https://github.com/uwsbel/chrono-wisc.git and checkout branch "project/leveling". You will need the following modules: Vehicle, VSG and FSI. if you checkout this repo&branch, you could build the demo.

The paper is under anoynomous review now, which we probably can't share the paper for now and sorry about that.

Best,

Harry