Abstract
Crawler vehicles are often used in dangerous sites such as forestry land and sediment disaster sites because of their high traveling performance on bad roads. In various situations where crawler vehicles are used, slope traveling is considered one of the most dangerous situations. In a steep slope, the vehicle must follow precisely the safe target trajectory so as not to slip down. Thus, the operator needs to skillfully adjust the rotational speed of the crawler according to the changing situation around the vehicle. Consequently, the automatic driving technology that automates traveling a steep slope is necessary for the operator's safety. For a case study in a controller design, a traveling simulation model with low calculation cost is necessary. In this study, the slope traveling simulation model based on the theory of Terramechanics was constructed. As a result, the model has overwhelmingly low calculation cost than a model using DEM. In addition, in order to verify the usefulness of this model in traveling controller design, a case study of a target path following simulation with PID controller was carried out. As the results, it’s indicated that our proposed model can be applied for a travel controller development.
