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Research Tasks

Real-time High-Fidelity Simulation for Autonomous Ground Vehicles

The goal of the task was to demonstrate an integrated simulation capability for U.S. Army ground vehicles that is real-time and high-fidelity that includes: vehicle multi-body dynamics, terrain modeling, and environment sensors, closed loop navigation, actuation, and control operation in urban and off-road scenarios.

We achieved our goals by implementing a military vehicle, the HMMWV, in the DARTS Lab ROAMS vehicle modeling framework. This required modeling suitable urban and off-road environments, implementing the complex closed-chain HMMWV vehicle suspension, and integrating vehicle sensing and navigation capabilities. Implementing the HMWWV suspension made use of cutting-edge dynamics constraint embedding techniques to significantly improve the efficiency of the dynamics suspension model.

At the end of this task, we demonstrated a simulation of autonomous driving in urban and off-road scenarios for a HMWWV using the JPL DARTS Lab ROAMS vehicle modeling framework.

This work is funded by US Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC).
Point of Contact: Jonathan Cameron
Sponsored By: Army