February 1, 2024 | Terrabite » View recording

The 11th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of the ISTVS was held online in September 2022, hosted by the Harbin Institute of Technology, PR China, and included presenters from around the world. The Conference Committee identified papers whose authors were encouraged to submit manuscripts for a Special Issue of the Society’s Journal of Terramechanics. The Special Issue that resulted represents a selection of the best papers of the conference: Best Papers of 11th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of the ISTVS.

ISTVS has been hosting online events for ongoing and recent research on terramechanics and terrain-vehicle systems under our Digital Event Series since 2021. Recordings from the series are posted to our YouTube channel.

Please join us in two upcoming sessions dedicated to the best papers from this Special Issue. This first session is on February 1.

A comparative study of the UGV tracked running gears mobility

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jterra.2023.11.003

Rubber track running gears are widely used in high-mobility unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) to increase their mobility, understood as overcoming tough terrain with terrain obstacles. Modern UGV chassis solutions use various rigid and sprung structures. To assess the capabilities of different types of running gears and compare them with each other, multi-body dynamics simulation models were created, the ability to overcome five terrain obstacles was checked, taking into account three different types of surfaces. The solutions are assessed on the basis of parameters of general overcoming obstacles efficiency, driving force and slip values, as well as the ground pressures distribution to choose the best structure in each criterion.

Daniela Szpaczyńska | PhD student at the Doctoral School of the Military University of Technology. She graduated with a master‘s degree in Mechanics and Machine Construction from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Military University of Technology with a thesis “Conceptual design of an engineering troops support robot.” Her current work is related to research on the functionality of light and medium class unmanned ground vehicles. Institute of Robots and Machine Design, Military University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

Review of modeling and validation techniques for tire-deformable soil interactions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jterra.2023.05.007

The mobility of vehicles in off-road environments is critical for many applications. This session presents an overview of the work done on tires–deformable soil interactions after the 2000’s. The capabilities and challenges of different modeling frameworks used for mobility (i.e., empirical, semi-empirical, and physics-based) are discussed with special emphasis given to continuum-based frameworks. A summary of terrain material models, tire models, and the tire-soil interface models are discussed. Strategies to validate all these models are presented. Finally, the application of these studies for assessing the sensitivity concerning input parameters (e.g., velocity, inflation pressure, and normal load), multi-pass, multi-layered soils, wet soils, and fully integrated multi-body vehicle models are discussed.

Varsha S. Swamy | Currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, under the guidance of Dr. Corina Sandu and Dr. Alba Yerro-Colom. Her Ph.D. research deals with the numerical modeling and experimental validation of tire-mud interactions, supported by the Automotive Research Center, a university-based U.S. Army Center of Excellence for modeling and simulation of military and civilian ground systems. Additionally, she received the SMART scholarship from the DoD and works with U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) at Vicksburg, Mississippi.