Off-Road Rover Mobility Simulation Using a Continuum Representation of Deformable Terrains
2022-01-0418
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- We seek to develop control policies for optimized rover mobility on deformable granular material terrains using a co-simulation framework implemented in an open-source simulation platform. An elasto-plastic continuum model is employed for the purpose of increasing the simulation speed in capturing the dynamics of the deformable granular material terrain. The solution of the continuum problem is obtained using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method; the rover is handled as a multibody system with constraints. Both the rover body and wheels are defined via geometries specified through triangular meshes. The two-way coupling between each wheel and the deformable terrain is implemented using so-called boundary conditions enforcing (BCE) particles attached to the rover wheel. A traction control algorithm is proposed to reduce wheel slip and hence power/energy usage in a hill-climbing scenario. The study is carried out in an in-house developed open source code called Chrono. The implementation of the computational approach and models described herein is available on GitHub as open source software for free use, modification, and reproducibility studies.
- Citation
- Hu, W., Zhou, Z., Serban, R., and Negrut, D., "Off-Road Rover Mobility Simulation Using a Continuum Representation of Deformable Terrains ," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0418, 2022, .