Run-time Assessment of Vehicle-terrain Interactions

Military and security operations often require that participants move as quickly as possible, while avoiding harm. Humans judge how fast they can drive, how sharply they can turn and how hard they can brake, based on a subjective assessment of vehicle handling, which results from responsiveness to driving commands, ride quality, and prior experience in similar conditions. Vehicle handling is a product of the vehicle dynamics and the vehicle-terrain interaction. Near real-time methods are needed for unmanned ground vehicles to assess their handling limits on the current terrain in order to plan and execute extreme maneuvers. This paper describes preliminary research to develop on-the-fly procedures to capture vehicle-terrain interaction data and simple models of vehicle response to driving commands, given the vehicle-terrain interaction data.