Title: Development of a multi-year database to assess off-road mobility algorithms in fine-grained soils

Authors: Farshid Vahedifard; James M. Williams; George L. Mason; Isaac L. Howard; Jody D. Priddy

Addresses: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS), Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS), Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA ' Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS), Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS), Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA ' US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), 3909 Halls Ferry Road, Vicksburg, MS 39180, USA

Abstract: A gap in off-road mobility is the availability of the test data necessary for the development and validation of tyre, track and soil models. This paper presents the results from a multi-year program to create the database records for off-road vehicle environments (DROVE), a consolidated database of laboratory and field test results. A fine-grained soil component was added to DROVE by compiling 2657 test results. Performance parameters including drawbar pull, motion resistance, torque, sinkage, and slip were included in the database. The database was used to evaluate the accuracy of existing algorithms used in the vehicle-terrain interface (VTI) model. The results indicated that the VTI algorithms can provide reasonable predictions for a few parameters but for others, such as motion resistance, further improvements are warranted. The DROVE dataset can be used for several applications including evaluation of existing mobility models, development of improved algorithms, and validation of numerical simulations.

Keywords: off-road mobility; DROVE; off-road vehicle environments; fine-grained soil; drawbar pull; motion resistance; sinkage; torque; slip; VTI; vehicle-terrain interface; data mining; multi-year database; off-road vehicles; test data; tyre models; track models; soil models; mobility modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVP.2017.081259

International Journal of Vehicle Performance, 2017 Vol.3 No.1, pp.3 - 18

Received: 07 Nov 2015
Accepted: 05 Apr 2016
Published online: 01 Jan 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article