The organizing committee is closely monitoring the COVID-19 situation. At this moment, the conference is scheduled to take place as planned in September. Because of the disturbances, the abstract submission deadline has been extended to April 15.

The Society wants to let you know that it’s not too late to renew your membership in the Society for 2020. Our journal publisher has the facility to mail back issues so that your collection of the Journal of Terramechanics will be complete. Your digital access will also be reactivated.

We are pleased to share this announcement of a forthcoming collection on the challenges of cold regions engineering in a changing climate, as well as the current practices and state-of-the-art tools for addressing them. Edited by Dr. Sally Shoop, the ISTVS Deputy General Secretary for the Americas. Frost Action in Soils: Fundamentals and Mitigation in a Changing Climate. Prepared by the Frozen Ground Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of the Cold Regions Engineering Division. Published by ASCE.

The Nevada Automotive Test Center is again sponsoring the ISTVS United States Student Travel Scholarship for the 2020 ISTVS conference in Montréal, September 20-23. The 1,000 USD competitive travel grant is for U.S. graduate students at a U.S. university who are ISTVS student members, to attend and present at the 2020 ISTVS conference. FMI: https://conference.istvs.org/

We are pleased to share this update on a forthcoming ground vehicle symposium: 12th Annual Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS) & Advanced Planning Briefing for Industry (APBI), August 11 – 13, 2020, Michigan, U.S. » link

With appreciation to Paul Ayers, University of Tennessee, for his years of contributions to the Society as U.S. National Secretary, in December the U.S. region held an election to choose a replacement. The votes are now in and effective at the 2020 ISTVS conference, George Mason is the incoming U.S. National Secretary. After a long career at the U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississipi, George is now a Research Professor at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems located at the Mississippi State University. George will work with Paul to transition into the role. Let’s welcome George.

The defense-industry website Breaking Defense reports that the U.S. Army is asking for industry input on the development of the replacement for its M1 Abrams tank, known as the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV). One of the key areas of the call for imput is of direct interest to the ISTVS community — mobility.

We are pleased to share this news of a new publication from ISTVS member Ramón Gonzalez. “Dear all, it is my great pleasure to share with you that Wiley has just released my new book on mobile robotics: Path Planning of Cooperative Mobile Robots Using Discrete Event Models. It can be explored by two different audiences: one looking for an intuitive software simulator for teaching robotics-related courses and another audience looking for the state-of-the-art research on path planning considering cell decomposition approaches and multi-robot systems. All the theoretical concepts are explained by using RMTool, a new Matlab-based robotic simulator, which is now freely available.

Please circulate this Call for Papers among your colleagues

On behalf of our Scientific and Organizing Committees, I would like to invite you to submit your contributions and participate in the 20th International Conference of the International Society for Terrain-Vehicle Systems in Montréal, September 20-23.

On behalf of the ISTVS and the Board of Directors, I would like to thank all our members for their support and cooperation with ISTVS activities and the Journal of Terramechanics in 2019. I hope the New Year finds you in good health, great success, and excellent spirit!

We are pleased to share this recent announcement from ISTVS member Ramón González. Rámon spearheaded the successful professional advancement course held in September in conjunction with our Prague conference. We are very happy to acknowledge his professional recognition and look forward to his future contributions to terramechanics and the Society!

To commend members of the ISTVS for outstanding achievements in our field, the Soehne-Hata-Jurecka Award and the Bekker-Reece-Radforth Award were established in 1996 and 2002, respectively. The awards are presented to the recipients by the President at the ISTVS International Conference held every three years. Next awards will be presented at the 20th ISTVS International Conference to be held in Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2020. Nominations for the next awards are now invited from members of ISTVS.

We are pleased to share the a book publication announcement from member Prof. Karl Theodor Renius. Fundamentals of Tractor Design