Design and Motion Simulation of the Autonomous Exploration Vehicle

This paper describes a novel design of exploration vehicle, ACV, and the scheme of motion control and path planning using the virtual prototyping system. ACV possesses the high local mobility and obstacle crossing ability due to the design of four independent drives and the active rock arms. An integrated design environment is established using ADAMS and Matlab/Simulink to simulate the vehicle kinematics, the interaction between the environment and the vehicle, the motion planning algorithm, the dynamic behavior, and the control strategy. A prototype path planner, the Modified Tangentbug Algorithm (MTA), is described and implemented to the navigation of the virtual vehicle. MTA generates a feasible path to avoid blocking obstacles, and to stride over passable obstacles in a known environment. The generated path is then decomposed into a sequence of motion commands written in ADAMS macros to control the vehicle. At last, a prototype ACV is described, and the interface structure between the simulation platform and the prototype is presented.