Abstract: Scene simulation technology has gained a vast range of application in many different fields, such as aerospace measurement and controlling, by displaying the mission process and flight status in 3D real-time graphics interactively, which provided a comprehensive and intuitive controlling platform. The lunar exploration has been implemented with unmanned lunar rovers to detect the environments of the moon. Tele-operation was adopted to control the whole process by making and sending detecting plan and programming to the rover, in which the position of the sun was the key constraint condition. An effective real-time soft shadow map algorithm was presented to visualize the geometry relation between the rover and the sun directly. The shadow map from the light view was generated. The key pixels on the edge of shadow were classified into five types for further procession according to its neighbours. Then the bilinear smoothing was used to remove the aliasing on the edge of shadow. This improved method was applied to generate the shadow of the scenario including a lunar rover and the moon ground. The results and experiments indicate that the algorithm produces a good soft shadow with real-time effect for dynamic scenes.

Key words: lunar rover, visual simulation, shadow map, anti-aliasing