Assessment and Virtualization of Tire-Soft Soil Interactions for Real-time Evaluation and Control of Autonomous Vehicle Mobility

Principal Investigator

• Samuel Misko (PI), University of Alabama, Birmingham

Staff

• Andres Morales, Masood Ghasemi, Siyuan Zhang, Michael Brascome, UAB

Students

• Jordan Whitson, UAB

Government

• David Gorsich, John Brabbs, Paramsothy Jayakumar, U.S. Army GVSC

Industry

• Thomas Way, National Soil Dynamics Laboratory (NSDL)
• Arnold Free, Naisense

Project began mid-2020 and was completed Q3 2021.

This project seeks to develop and evaluate new fundamental approaches to real-time estimation and visualization of tire-soil interactions for the purpose of:

1. Real-time, onboard vehicle mobility estimation,
2. Real-time, mobility performance visualization in close-to-real-operational-conditions to improve training of human operators of remotely controlled vehicles and
3. Obtain relevant solider and/or stakeholder feedback on vehicle designs with respect to autonomous mobility.

The NATO STO Technical Report AVT-248 defines the Next-Generation NATO Reference Mobility Model (NG-NRMM) to be “any modeling and simulation (M&S) capability that predicts land and amphibious vehicle mobility through coordinated interoperation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and multibody, physics-based vehicle dynamic modeling and simulation software” [1]. This document further discusses the challenges that lay ahead for ensuring that multibody, physics-based vehicle dynamic modeling and simulation software is capable of utilizing “Terramechanics to properly assess vehicle / terrain soft soil interactions, incorporate capabilities to portray autonomous control systems, and include uncertainty quantification to enable probabilistic M&S.” The NG-NRMM developments make a solid foundation that will be utilized in this project as a starting point for further fundamental research and development of new approaches.

The targeted M&S platform for this project is CM-Lab’s Vortex Studio. Utilization of common game engines, such as Unreal or Unity, provide opportunities to make the real-time simulations developed in Vortex Studio more accessible for different organizations and stakeholders, as well as deployable across different computing platforms. For the US Army in particular, it is important to develop and utilize these types of gaming engines to facilitate feedback from soldiers to generate new insights into soldier tactics and behaviors that can then be used “to refine concepts and influence ground vehicle requirements, operational doctrine and designs”.[2]

References:

[1] Balling, Ole et al. “AVT-248 Next-Generation NATO Reference Mobility Model (NG-NRMM) Development.” 2019: n. pag. Print.

[2] Gorsich, David et al. “THE USE OF GAMING ENGINES FOR DESIGN REQUIREMENTS.” International Design Conference, 2020.

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