Abstract:
Unmanned ground vehicles are being deployed in increasingly diverse and complex environments. Advances in the field of robotics, including perception technology, computing power, and machine learning, have brought robots from the lab to the real world. Remote and autonomous vehicles are now used to explore volcanoes, caves, pipes, war zones, disaster sites, and even other planets.

With the dramatic developments in the sensing and planning, the area of ground vehicle mobility presents rich possibilities for mechanical innovations that may be especially relevant for unmanned systems. In particular, reconfigurability may enable vehicles to traverse a wider set of terrains with greater efficiency by allowing them the benefits of multiple configurations. However, reconfigurability is not without its costs including increased size, weight, cost, and complexity. A quantitative method for evaluating the positive and negative impacts of reconfigurability would allow for informed decisions to be made about its inclusion in unmanned vehicle design.

This effort starts with the formation of definitions and metrics for reconfigurability, mobility, and complexity, drawing from a wide range of robotic applications. The field of ground vehicle reconfigurability is summarized and used to inform the design of a novel manually reconfigurable robot and establish best practices related to reconfigurability. Small tracked vehicle mobility is analytically and experimentally evaluated using the reconfigurable testbed with variable contact length, track width, sprocket diameter, and track tension. Finally, a unifying method is presented for combining the analysis from the custom metrics.

The main proposed contribution of this research is a systematic method for driving unmanned vehicle design for mobility optimization with the inclusion of reconfigurability and an accounting of complexity.

Thesis Committee Members:
Dimitrios (Dimi) Apostolopoulos, Chair
John Dolan
Aaron Johnson
Corina Sandu, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University