Developing a Realistic Simulation Environment of Off-road Terrain for UGV

Recently, the technology of Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) has had rapid development. The intelligent behavior of modern UGV in off-road terrain has become a significant issue in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Experimentation on the UGV in reality not only costs too much, but is also difficult to replicate the problem of UGVs’ behavior. So, developing a realistic simulation environment of off-road terrain in software is crucially important. In this paper, a realistic simulation environment of off-road terrain is designed based on Blender and CoppeliaSim. First, the models of landform, road and plants are built and rendered in Blender. Then, they are assembled into a realistically off-road terrain for UGV in CoppeliaSim. Last, the generated simulated off-road terrain is tested using a predetermined UGV, which is running to identify the environment.