Legged robots that operate in the real world are inherently subject to stochasticity in their dynamics and uncertainty about the terrain. Due to limited energy budgets and limited control authority, these “disturbances” cannot always be canceled out with high-gain feedback. Minimally-actuated walking machines subject to stochastic disturbances no longer satisfy strict conditions for limit-cycle...

Traditional terramechanics theorems utilise pressure-sinkage models based on the assumption that the contact area between a tyre and soil can be approximated as a flat plate. Examples include work by Bekker, Reece, and Ishigami. Recently, the authors have demonstrated that 1) this approximation does not hold for wheels with a diameter less than approximately 50 cm and 2) an improved diameter-de...

Analysis of stress distributions under lightweight wheeled vehicles Report Title In recent years, the need for reliable modeling tools for lightweight robotic systems deployed on various terrains has spurred research efforts into development of vehicle terrain interaction (VTI) models. This paper presents an analysis of rigid wheels dry sand interaction and compares experimental results with pr...

This paper revisited some wheel–workpiece interaction problems in surface grinding including the profile of heat flux and the variation of the wheel’s elastic modulus. A method of using an optical microscope and a CCD camera was applied to capture the depth and width of the heated zone, the details of the temperature field and the stability of the heat flux. It was found that the heat flux in u...

Several infrastructures, such as bridges and tunnels, require periodic inspection and repair to prevent collapse. There is a strong demand for practical bridge inspection robots to reduce the cost and time associated with the inspection of bridges by an inspector. Bridge inspection robots are expected to pass through obstacles such as bolted splice part and right-angled routes. The aim of this ...

The issues of filling the information model with data on state wheel-rail tribosystem are considered. “Program for modeling transverse position a wheelset in track” is used, and main modules program described. geometrical parameters contact wheel profile rail obtained. values nominal extreme intermediate positions pair track calculated. displacement track, its slope, width rail, gap between cre...

The United States Army began developing Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) in the early 1900’s. Concurrently, researchers developed and enhanced passenger and commercial ground vehicles. Although significant progress has been made for improving vehicle mobility for all ground vehicles throughout the past century, mobility has lacked a concise mutually agreed definition and analytical standardized c...

We prove that a graph has an r-bounded subdivision of wheel if and only it does not have graph-decomposition locality r width at most two.

INTRODUCTION Surface relief structures at micro and nanoscales are currently focused in different engineering areas. These structures enable special optical, mechanical or chemical properties of the workpiece surfaces. One example is the riblet surface, on which microgrooves are distributed in flow direction. Compared to smooth surfaces ideal riblet structures have been proven to reduce skin fr...

Pose estimation is one of the vital issues in mobile robot navigation. Odometry data can be fused with absolute position measurements to provide better and more reliable pose estimation. This paper deals with the determination of better relative localization of a two wheeled differential drive robot by means of odometry by considering the influence of parameters namely weight, velocity, wheel p...