Advanced Mobility Testbed for Dynamic Semi-Autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Abstract : Integrated simulation capabilities that are high-fidelity, fast, and have scalable architecture are essential to support autonomous vehicle design and performance assessment for the U.S. Army's growing use of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). With increased onboard autonomy, advanced vehicle models are needed to analyze and optimize control design and sensor packages over a range of urban and off-road scenarios. Recent work at US Army TARDEC has attempted to develop a high-fidelity mobility simulation of an autonomous vehicle in an off-road scenario using integrated sensor, controller, and multi-body dynamics models. The conclusion was that (a) real-time simulation was not feasible due to the complexity of the intervening formulation, (b) models had to be simplified to speed up the simulation, (c) interfacing the sensors was exceedingly difficult due to co-simulation, (d) the controls developed were very basic and could not be optimized, and (e) a rigid terrain model was used. The research described in this paper is from a collaborative project between US Army TARDEC and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to develop an advanced UGV mobility testbed using JPL's ROAMS vehicle modeling capability [2] and to address the aforementioned issues in meeting the US Army's UGV modeling and simulation needs. The ROAMS ground vehicle simulation framework can support tasks ranging from real-time embedded hardware- in-the-loop testing to large-scale Monte Carlo simulation based parametric studies. ROAMS has been successfully used at JPL in several space mission-critical scenarios for NASA across multiple domains (cruise/orbiter, landers, and rovers). ROAMS is unique in its integrated approach to handling the high-fidelity dynamics, sensors, environ- ment, control, and autonomy models that are required for such highly complex missions and are key attributes of future Army unmanned ground vehicles.