Visualization of Crawler-Type Motion Based on Track Segmentation

Crawler-type vehicles are widely employed in the field of engineering. The visualization of crawler belt was an important aspect in the simulation system, which were compounded of many pedrail units connected with each other. The motion of pedrail was very complex and was mostly represented in the traditional keyframe animation approach. We present a simple method for visualization of crawler-type vehicles. The periodic motions of the pedrail is divided into segmentations by the centroid position of pedrail modules. The motion of each pedrail module is limited in the corresponding segmentation, in which the position changing and rotation can be treated linearly. And the status of pedrail modules can be updated corresponding to the movement of the vehicle. By this trick, the nonlinear full cycle movement of the pedrail belt is converted into the linear motion within those segmentations. The experiments demostrated its effectiveness.