In this chapter, we introduce modeling and control for wheeled mobile robots and tracked vehicles. The target environment is rough terrains, which includes both deformable soil and heaps of rubble. Therefore, the topics are roughly divided into two categories, wheeled robots on deformable soil and tracked vehicles on heaps of rubble.
After providing an overview of this area in Sect. 50.1, a modeling method of wheeled robots on a deformable terrain is introduced in Sect. 50.2. It is based on terramechanics, which is the study focusing on the mechanical properties of natural rough terrain and its response to off-road vehicle, specifically the interaction between wheel/track and soil. In Sect. 50.3, the control of wheeled robots is introduced. A wheeled robot often experiences wheel slippage as well as its sideslip while traversing rough terrain. Therefore, the basic approach in this section is to compensate the slip via steering and driving maneuvers. In the case of navigation on heaps of rubble, tracked vehicles have much advantage. To improve traversability in such challenging environments, some tracked vehicles are equipped with subtracks, and one kinematical modeling method of tracked vehicle on rough terrain is introduced in Sect. 50.4. In addition, stability analysis of such vehicles is introduced in Sect. 50.5. Based on such kinematical model and stability analysis, a sensor-based control of tracked vehicle on rough terrain is introduced in Sect. 50.6. Sect. 50.7 summarizes this chapter.
Qualification testing of a tracked vehicle in the NIST Disaster City
Author SuperDroid Robots, Inc
Video ID : 189
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) developed a standard test field for evaluation of all-terrain mobile robots, called Disaster City in Texas, U.S.A. The field includes steps, stairs, steep slopes, and random step fields (unfixed wooden blocks), which simulates a disaster environment. This video-clip shows an evaluation test of the tracked vehicle, called LT-F, produced by SuperDroidRobots in 2011 in the Disaster City. All tests had to be performed remotely by the vehicle for 10 successful iterations each to qualify.