Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : Dynamics and Design Conference 2021
Date : September 13, 2021 - September 17, 2021
Crawlers are widely used as construction vehicles that require high trafficability in off-road situations. When being operated on a slope, such vehicles often slip due to skidding between the crawlers and the soil. When the posture of the front structures on a hydraulic excavator changes, the amount of skidding also dynamically changes. A highly skilled operator must deftly adjust the left and right crawlers to follow a target trajectory. Since the construction industry requires the development of assisted and autonomous technologies, a crawler-traveling simulation model on soft ground is needed. We established a traveling simulation model on a slope by terramechanics for a crawler vehicle with a changing center of gravity. The ground parameters in our simulation model were identified using the actual test data of the crawler vehicle. Then we compared the simulated, traveling results that were identified with actual vehicle experiments and verified that our simulation methodology reproduced the skidding of a crawler vehicle on off-road slopes. In addition, several case studies were performed to understand the effect of the changing center of gravity on the traveling trajectory.
