Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 08, 2016 - June 11, 2016
The traveling performance of off-the-road vehicles, such as exploration rovers and construction machinery, significantly depends on the interaction between the ground and the traveling mechanism, since inelastic ground deformation and frictional sliding phenomena are induced by the vehicle's movement. In the terramechanics community, several types of equipments able to travel on soft terrain have been developed in the past decades. Among these, crawler vehicles have proven that this mechanism is advantageous. However, the origin of running resistance has not been explained, and thus it is desired to propose a novel method to evaluate trafficability. In this study, we focused on numerical modeling of trafficability for the scenario of a scale-modeled single caterpillar track traveling under arbitrary slippage. In the analyses, we predicted the movement of crawler vehicles by applying one of terramechanics theories called Resistive Force Theory (RFT).
