Sand to Mud to Fording: Modeling and Simulation for Off-Road Ground Vehicle Mobility Analysis

This contribution highlights modeling and numerical solution techniques that enable the simulation of ground vehicles operating in off-road conditions. We briefly outline the equations of motion governing the time evolution of complex systems such as, for instance, large collections of granular material or full vehicles. Herein, we demonstrate how these equations of motion have been used in an open source multi-physics simulation software called Chrono to investigate the dynamics of wheeled and tracked vehicles operating on granular material. Next, we briefly discuss the fluid-solid interaction problem, which comes into play, for instance, when simulating fording operations in which a vehicle negotiates a body of water. The two salient attributes of the approach proposed are reliance on differential algebraic inequalities tomodel the dynamics of solid and fluid phases; and, leverage of parallel computing to handle systems with millions of degrees of freedom.