EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE MOBILITY OF LIGHTWEIGHT VEHICLES ON SAND

摘要

From scientific exploration of remote areas of land difficult for humans to traverse, to military missions presenting safety threats to personnel, to rescue missions deep into mines or otherwise unstable lands, the need for mobile lightweight vehicle technology with special emphasis on off-road conditions is great. Thus, this study has been designed to aid the understanding of the mobility of such vehicles with varying locomotion platforms on sand, and involves two segments. The first segment consists of the development of a Mobility Metrics Matrix (MMM), which serves as a tool to assess the mobility of lightweight vehicles for their mission-specific suitability and performance in order to choose the best candidate for a given mission. User-defined mission needs are linked to vehicle-ground interaction, vehicle performance, vehicle geometry and instrument sensitivity measures by high, low or adverse relationships. The second and most extensive segment of the study was the experimental testing and statistical analysis of a wheeled all-terrain vehicle to quantify the effects of sand gradation, sand moisture, vehicle speed, and vehicle payload on measures of tread and carcass sinkage into the sand, as well as on elements of the pressure distribution (peak, average, and difference between the two) in the contact patch. A follow-up experimentation of 100-pass interaction was observationally analyzed for the time-lapsed trends on the same five measures of vehicle-ground.