This talk will explore how the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center - ERDC (previously known as WES) approaches mobility for ground vehicles operating in adverse conditions. In particular, this presentation talks about mobility research on soft soils and cold regions from Dr. Brad Hansen and Mr. Michael Parker

Zeinab El-Sayegh, PhD, PEng, Department of Automotive and Mechatronics Engineering, Ontario Tech University, will introduce the concept of virtual soil moisturization and its impact on the performance of 315/80R22.5-sized truck tires. The truck tires are simulated using multiple layers and materials in a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) environment. Moist sand, composed of layered water and sand particles, is simulated using the Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. The tire-sand interaction is defined by a hybrid FEA-SPH interaction model, and the tire's tractive performance—including tractive effort, motion resistance coefficient, and tire sinkage—will be presented.

Christopher Goodin, Ph.D., Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, Mississippi State University, will introduce the MAVS and show some examples of how it is being used in the classroom as an instructional tool for autonomous vehicles, by graduate students for research, and by researchers around the world in a variety of military and commercial applications. The technical underpinnings of the MAVS will also be presented.

Dan Negrut, NVIDIA CUDA Fellow, Bernard A. and Frances M. Weideman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Simulation-Based Engineering Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our lab has worked on several projects aimed at improving the mobility of autonomous rovers operating in lunar conditions. The design of such rovers increasingly relies on computer simulation. The talk will cover two main topics: it presents an overview of terramechanics models in robotics, and it briefly describes the sensing used in lunar mobility simulations.

Dr. Peter Kiss, Professor of Biosystems Engineering, Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Science. Dr. Peter Kiss and Ph.D. candidate Nihal Salman discuss a state-of-the-art on load-bearing capacity of soil as a homogeneous finite half-space and ongoing research in terramechanics and land locomotion.

Dr. Paul Ayers, ISTVS Fellow, Biosystems Engineering Professor Emeritus, University of Tennessee. The Next Generation NATO Reference Mobility Model (NG-NRMM) provides an opportunity for the utilization of physics-based Vehicle Terrain Interaction models. This presentation provides the framework for possible vehicle-soil interaction components to assist model development. The physics-based components include tire placement, surface loading, stress distribution, time-dependent soil compression (multi-pass), preconsolidation stresses, soil rebound, lateral displacement, slip sinkage, and soil bulldozing.

Dr. George Mason, ISTVS Fellow, Center for Advanced Vehicle Systems, Mississippi State University. A general discussion of the uses of mapping and geographical information systems (GIS) to build an off-road simulation environment. We present the typical input data fields for models such as the NATO Reference Mobility Model (NRMM) and websites that contain information useful in defining the attributes. We discuss some of the temporal and spatial issues and future work in GIS.