Review of Current Developments in Terrain Characterization and Modeling

摘要

As computational power builds to meet the needs of ground vehicle designers, the focus has begun to shift fromlaboratory testing of prototype parts and subsystems to computational simulations of the vehicle. In the automotive anddefense industries, large strides have been made in simulating full vehicle responses, such as durability. Thesesimulations are most meaningful when excited by proper mathematical models that accurately characterize the terrain. Itis important to understand the roughness indices that are used to judge the terrain profiles. The state-of-the-art in terraincharacterization and modeling is reviewed in this work for models including Power Spectral Density (PSD), MarkovChains, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Parametric Road Spectrum (PRS), Shifted Spatial RangeSpectrum (SSR), Direct Spectrum Estimation (DSE) and Transformed Direct Spectrum Estimation (TrDSE). Theapplicability, limitations, and benefits of these models are assessed based on their effectiveness in capturing thestochastic nature of the terrain being characterized. A discussion of terrain characterization usage to advance reliabilitytesting concludes this work as an example of the applicability of this technology.