Wheeled-tracked vehicles are mainly suitable for relatively flat terrain. Legged-vehicles, on the other hand, have the potential to handle wide variety of terrain. Robug IIs is a legged climbing robot designed to work in relatively unstructured and rough terrain. It has the capability of walking, climbing vertical surfaces and performing autonomous floor to wall transfer. The sensing technique ...

This document contains details of the SCM deformable soil model implemented in Chrono. The soft soil model discussed herein is an extended version of the classical SCM Soil Contact Model used at DLR for predicting rover mobility. The model, which is based on a fast semi-empirical expeditious approach that requires few parameters, is ideal for scenarios that require a fast (near real-time) simul...

Military vehicles are sometimes required to transit bridges owned and operated by civilian bridge authorities. Using available data regarding the gross vehicle weight associated axle loads of military traffic, live load factors, calibrated Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code, proposed for design evaluation. This paper recommends factors three categories vehicles: (i) wheeled-transport vehicles;...

This paper deals with navigation problem of wheeled oo-road robots while taking into account the mechanical behavior of the locomotion system and its interaction with the environment. We developed a simulation model of quasi-static motion for a class of wheeled and suspended vehicles. Command velocities are computed by tracking the vehicle control point along the prescribed path. To evaluate th...

In this paper, we consider a hybrid control strategy for stabilization of nonholonomic systems. In particular, we deal with a typical nonholonomic system, namely a two-wheeled vehicle. We first rewrite the system in a chained form, and then transform it into a nonholonomic integrator (NHI) system. Finally, we apply and modify the hybrid control method for the NHI system, so that the entire syst...

Legged robots have superior terrain adaptability comparing to traditional wheeled vehicles. They also offer attractive capabilities in terms of agility and obstacle avoidance. On the other hand, traditional wheeled platforms provide sufficient robustness, mechanical simplicity and energetic performance. They are fast, powerful in terms of load to weight ratio, stable, and easy to control. Hybri...