Simple Terramechanics-based Tire and Soil Separation for Tire Behavior Characterization

Principal Investigators

• Vladimir Vantsevich (PI), Worchester Polytechnic Institute
• Lee Moradi (co-PI), WPI

Staff

• Jesse Paldan, WPI

Students

• TBD

Government

• David Gorsich, Amandeep Singh, Jordan Whitson, U.S. Army GVSC

Industry

• David Kline, Applied Intuition

Project #3.A120 begins in 2025.

Simple Terramechanics (ST) has many advantages that contribute to its widespread and continued use. ST approaches are simple for modeling, making them applicable for real-time and faster than real-time simulation and control. At the same time, terramechanics-related concerns still exist, specifically in estimating contributions of tire and soil to the wheel mobility and energy efficiency in real-time-and-faster-than real-time-simulation. If the concerns are overcome, new perspectives will be open for real-and-faster-than-real-time applications in agile wheel mobility and energy efficiency simulations and controls. A particular attention of this project is that ST models have their derivations based in part in experimental results which were obtained for specific vehicles and conditions, resulting in a lack of separation of the tire and terrain contributions to their main outcomes, including static and dynamic sinkage and slippage.

The overarching goal is to elevate and extend the boundaries of ST to a new stage of modeling and estimation of separate contributions of the tire and soil and their influence on wheel mobility, energy efficiency, and agile dynamics.

The Research Objectives for the project are formulated which target the tech novelty to separate the tire and soil impacts on tire-terrain interaction in ST models which can be used in real time. Research Objectives 1-2 separate the contributions of the tire and soil to the tire-soil normal (Objective 1) and longitudinal (Objective 2) behavior. Research Objective 3 applies fundamentals developed in Objectives 1-2 to modeling of the tire and soil contributions to energy efficiency and mobility. Research Objective 4 extends research objective 3 by expanding the split tire-soil characterization to different terrains using experimental data from literature and other AVMI FY24 projects to compare and rank tire performance on different terrains. Research Objective 5 extends the tire and soil separation to dynamic and agile modes of operation in unsteady speed modes.

#3.A120